A Guide to Sources of Information on the National Labor Relations Board

Gordon T. Law Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317777762
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

A concise history of the board in the U.S. from its inception in 1935, including an overview of current case law, and a bibliographic essay of selected secondary literature about the board.

Chapter II
The Secondary Literature on the Board: A Bibliographic Essay

by
Margaret A. Chaplan

[Margaret A. Chaplan is Labor and Industrial Relations Librarian, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of numerous articles in the field of collective bargaining in libraries and bibliographic access to the literature of industrial relations and human resource management, including "Mapping Laborline Thesaurus Terms to Library of Congress Subject Heading: Implications for Vocabulary Switching," Library Quarterly, 65 (January 1995), 39-61. This bibliographic essay covers imprints from 1933 through 1995. GL]

Outline of Sections

1. I. Introduction
   1. A. Contents of chapter
      1. 1. Subject
      2. 2. Scope
      3. 3. Organization
      4. 4. Entry format
   2. B. Sources used to compile references
      1. 1. Sources consulted
      2. 2. Examination of sources
   3. C. Commentary on the literature
      1. 1. Size
      2. 2. Authors
      3. 3. Patterns
2. II. History of the Board and its predecessors
   1. A. General histories of the Board
   2. B. National Labor Board and the "Old NLRB
   3. C. Wagner Act NLRB
3. III. Board functions
   1. A. Interpretation of the NLRA
      1. 1. Board’s authority and powers
      2. 2. Board's decisions [omitted]
   2. B. Administration of the NLRA
      1. 1. Administrative organization and management in general
         1. a) Structure
         2. b) Operation
            1. (1) Board departments and personnel
               1. (a) Board members
               2. (b) General Counsel
               3. (c) Regional offices
               4. (d) Administrative law judges
               5. (e) The Board as employer
            2. (2) Case handling and productivity
      2. 2. Board practice and procedure
         1. a) Practice
            1. (1) Guides to NLRB rules and regulations
            2. (2) Guides for specific types of cases
         2. b) Procedural policies adopted by the Board
            1. (1) Jurisdictional standards
            2. (2) Settlements and informal procedures
            3. (3) Discovery and Freedom Of Information Act requests
            4. (4) Rulemaking
            5. (5) Stare decisis
            6. (6) Other
4. IV. Board relations with other federal government bodies
   1. A. The president
   2. B. Congress
      1. 1. Appointments
      2. 2. Oversight and investigation
   3. C. Federal courts
      1. 1. Judicial review
      2. 2. The Board's nonacquiescence policy
   4. D. Other administrative and employment law agencies
5. V. Criticism of the Board
   1. A. Partiality and bias
   2. B. Case handling
   3. C. Suggestions for reform
      1. 1. Procedural
      2. 2. Labor court
      3. 3. Other
6. VI. Other bibliographies
7. VII. Sources consulted in compiling bibliography
8. VIII. Dissertations that appear relevant but were not examined

I. Introduction

This chapter examines the secondary literature on the administrative, organizational, and procedural history, as opposed to the decisional history, of the Board (hereafter referred to as the NLRB or the Board) as well as the research on the Board's behavior and on its interactions with government, labor, and management in the United States. Readers who wish to trace developments in Board decisions or doctrines should consult the sources listed in Chapter 4. Nor has there been any attempt to include materials on the content or legislative history of amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (hereafter referred to as the Wagner Act, the NLRA, or the Labor Act), except as they may have affected the structure or procedure of the Board.

The types of materials included are books, articles, dissertations monographs, and papers in proceedings. Excluded are newspaper articles, master's theses, publications in foreign languages, and government documents, including publications by the Board itself. A discussion of government documents relating to the Board appears in Chapter 6. Also excluded, for the most part, are articles and commentaries from news magazines. The Board has been a subject of controversy from its very beginning, and the number of news items about appointments, decisions, appropriations and budgets, congressional oversight hearings, and criticism is too large to encompass as well as being extremely repetitive. A very few items have been included that violate these selection principles because they presented an important viewpoint or an innovative idea, or because there was no other treatment of an important topic.

This is a selective listing, restricting analysis only to the secondary literature and emphasizing research, rather than popular, materials. In the section on procedural policies adopted by the Board, the topics selected were Board procedures that are primarily discretionary and did not result from an interpretation of the Labor Act. In addition, there has been a conscious effort not to overlap with the content of other chapters in this volume.

Publication dates range from 1933 to approximately September 1995.

The materials are organized into four broad sections: the origins and history of the NLRJB and its predecessors, the functions of the Board, the Board's relations with other federal government bodies, and criticism of the Board. An additional final section contains other bibliographies on the Board. Within each section and subsection, an introduction discusses how each of the items listed in the section addresses the topic at issue. Numbers in parentheses within the narrative refer to the numbers of the citations listed below. The actual citations to the items discussed in the introduction are listed in alphabetical order after the section or subsection introduction.

Both electronic and print sources were used to compile the original list of citations. Commercially available and in-house databases were searched. If they existed, print versions of indexes were searched for years prior to those in the electronic file. Other sources consulted included: card catalogs, printed catalogs, printed indexing and abstracting tools, bibliographies, proceedings of professional associations, plus footnote tracking of references listed in the items themselves. A complete list of the sources consulted is in section VII at the end of this chapter. Each source was searched from 1933, or from the date of its first publication, to approximately September 1995. Items that originally appeared relevant were rejected on the basis of their title or an abstract as well as after examination. Each item listed in this chapter has been personally examined; materials not locally held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign were obtained through interlibrary loan. A list of dissertations that appeared relevant, but were unavailable for examination, is in section VIII at the end of this chapter.

In general, the secondary literature on the Board is voluminous, repetitive, and, in many cases, written by persons with some connection to the Board. Even if one excludes the huge body of literature analyzing or criticizing various Board decisions and doctrines, there remains a staggering amount of published material about the Board. It seems as if every decision, every appointment, every budget authorization, and every oversight hearing throughout the Board's entire history has evoked comment from friends and foes. Sometimes the same material appears in various formats. For example, an attorney may give a speech at a labor law symposium which is printed in its proceedings, then may appear later in a state bar association journal, and finally be published as an article in a law review. While former Board members and Board employees have often written about the Board, and attorneys and academics have also contributed to the literature, there is a noticeable lack of research material written from the union point of view.

II. History of the Board and its Predecessors

A. General Histories of the Board

The only scholarly general history of the Board is represented by the three volumes written by Gross (2,3,4). Although issued by different publishers, they are intended as a single, three-volume work analyzing the history of the NLRB, how it has been shaped by changing political and economic forces, and its role in the growth of national labor policy and the body of American labor law. The first volume (3) begins with the creation of the National Labor Board in 1933 and ends with the 1937 Supreme Court decision sustaining the constitutionality of the NLRA and the Board created by that Act. The book traces the activity of the predecessor boards and the development of labor policy in the context of the political and economic conflicts of the time, and it shows how the experience with the National Labor Board and the various New Deal industry boards influenced the provisions of the Wagner Act and the nature of the NLRB. The second volume (4) discusses how the Board's vigorous, uncompromising, and controversial enforcement of the Wagner Act subjected it to intense political pressure and congressional investigation, leading ultimately to the passage of the Labor-Management Relations Act (hereafter referred to as the LMRA or the Taft-Hartley Act). T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• I. THE NLRB: AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE
• II. THE SECONDARY LITERATURE ON THE BOARD: A BIBLIOGRAPHIC ESSAY
• III. THE LAW OF LABOR RELATIONS
• IV. FINDING NLRB AND RELATED COURT DECISIONS
• V. LAW REVIEW COMMENTARY
• VI. SOURCES OF INFORMATION ABOUT THE NLRB IN FEDERAL GOVERNMENT DOCUMENTS
• VII. ARCHIVES AND MANUSCRIPTS RELATING TO THE NLRB
• APPENDIX A. NLRB ANNUAL REPORTS APPENDIXES: 1936/36 TO 1998/99
• APPENDIX B. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD MEMBERS, 1935-2001
• APPENDIX C. NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD GENERAL COUNSELS, 1935-2001
• APPENDIX D. SESSION DATES OF THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS, 73rd TO 107th CONGRESS
• APPENDIX E. FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT (FOIA) REQUESTS
• INDEX