Labor Reform in the New Deal

8 Key excerpts on "Labor Reform in the New Deal"

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  A Companion to Franklin D. Roosevelt

  • William D. Pederson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Chapter Nine LABOR

  Martin Halpern

  During the Roosevelt years, the federal government assumed new responsibilities for managing the economy. Paying significant attention to the needs of workers, both employed and unemployed, and giving support to labor unions were features of the Roosevelt administration’s approach to managing the economy. Labor historian David Montgomery refers to the creation of a “New Deal formula,” in which the federal government promoted economic growth and encouraged and regulated collective bargaining while unions allied with the Democratic Party (1979: 161). Despite the 1947 Taft–Hartley Act’s conservative revision of the foundational 1935 National Labor Relations Act, the New Deal system persisted until the 1970s, when economic difficulties connected with increased international competition, high military spending, and the Vietnam War caused its decay. Promoting economic growth became problematical and the Democrats failed to satisfy unions’ demands for help against aggressive anti-unionism by business (Halpern 2003). By the time of Ronald Reagan’s accession to the presidency in 1981, Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle conclude, the “New Deal, as a dominant order of ideas, public policies, and political alliances died” (1989: ix).

  Prior to the New Deal, the US labor movement was dominated by craft unions of the American Federation of Labor (AFL). During the Roosevelt era, under the aegis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), industrial workers “wrested contracts from some of the most bitter-end corporations” and “boldly intruded into political and governmental arenas” (Zieger 1995: 1). Craft and semi-industrial unions, such as the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), also grew rapidly. Union density, the percentage of workers belonging to unions, increased from 5.2 percent of the labor force in 1933 to 21.9 percent in 1945. Although union density continued to rise after World War II, peaking at 25.5 percent in 1953, union membership growth failed thereafter to keep pace with the expansion of the labor force. After Reagan’s election, union density began a rapid decline, dropping from 22.0 percent in 1980 to 12.3 percent in 2009 (United States 1975: 137–8). To explain the decline, Nelson Lichtenstein notes, some historians focus on technological and market developments and others on employer hostility, a less favorable legal environment, and a breakdown of union–liberal alliances (2002: 215–34). Emphasizing the deterioration of legal protections, unions have in the last three decades conducted three major campaigns to reform federal labor law to restore the New Deal principle that government should encourage collective bargaining, but they have thus far been unsuccessful (Halpern 2003).

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  The South and the New Deal

  • Roger Biles(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  LABOR AND THE NEW DEAL Workers live in terror of being penalized for joining unions; and the employers live in a state of mingled rage and fear against this imported monstrosity: organized labor. —FERA investigator Martha Gellhorn, November 30, 1934 Whether entirely intended or not, the New Deal had a profound impact on labor unions, with such landmark pieces of legislation as section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). Labor's successes in the 1930s not only resus-citated a listless American Federation of Labor but also led indus-trial unionists to break away from the craft union-controlled AFL to form the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Both organiza-tions won notable victories resulting in recognition, collective bar-gaining, and improved wages and working conditions, but they met particularly stiff resistance in the tradition-laden South. Well-publicized violence erupted in the coal mines of Harlan County, the Piedmont textile villages, the cotton fields of plantation Arkansas, and the big city factories. Determined to protect regional wage scales, which presumably gave southern industrialists a competi-tive boost, and threatened by rumors of Communist influence and racial mixing in the CIO, southern businessmen and government officials curtailed civil liberties and employed violence on several occasions. Organized labor fought hard for its successes in the 1930s but, even with New Deal backing, frequently settled for in-cremental advances that paved the way for more substantial victo-ries in the future. 84 THE SOUTH AND THE NEW DEAL The spark for union activity came from the NIRA's section 7(a) ; which guaranteed workers the right to organize and bargain collec-tively.

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  A New Deal for China’s Workers?

  • Cynthia Estlund(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  C HAPTER FOUR How Did the New Deal Resolve the American “Labor Question”? Bringing a Comparative Lens into Focus WHEN SEEN THROUGH Western-tinted glasses, both China’s workers, in their increasingly well-organized forms of collective action, and China’s government, in its response to that collective action, appear in some ways to be following in the footsteps of the United States and other major industrial economies of the world during the twentieth century. As mass industrialization brought conflict between labor and capital, the resulting “labor question”—what to do about the disorder and violence surrounding labor conflict—became a leading domestic concern, and the predicate for major pro-worker labor reforms. 1 Those reforms have been of roughly two types: regulation of terms and conditions of employment, chiefly through minimum labor standards and mechanisms for their enforcement; and legal frameworks for peaceful collective self-help and collective bargaining through trade unions. Government regulation of wages and working conditions alone has never been sufficient to meet the challenges of industrial unrest, especially in the more productive sectors of the economy. And so institutions of collective self-help and national frameworks for collective bargaining are at the core of the industrial relations systems of “regulatory capitalism,” varying forms of which emerged across the developed world in the twentieth century. 2 Much of the initial construction of these institutions in the United States was compressed into the dramatic New Deal period of reform in the 1930s. The history of labor conflict and its resolution among the early industrializers of the world, and the United States in particular, might illuminate the dilemmas China faces as it seeks to manage labor unrest in its increasingly advanced industrial market economy. The point here is neither to predict nor to prescribe China’s path in the years ahead

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  Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin

  A Study in Labor-Management Politics

  • R. Alton Lee(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • The University Press of Kentucky

    (Publisher)

  1. Unions and the Democrats It is a truism that labor unions thrive on adversity, and sel-dom in American history did they face greater affliction than during the Great Depression. As the economic spiral continued downward during the 1930s, desperate workers turned increasingly to the American Federation of Labor (AFL) for union charters in hopes of bettering their lot through organization and collective bargaining. In turn, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal admin-istration decided these efforts needed encouragement and assistance and persuaded Congress to establish a national labor policy that promoted the growth of unions. In an effort to stimulate industrial recovery, the first New Deal enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which established the National Recovery Adminis-tration (NRA). Section 7(a) of this law for the first time gave federal sanction for workers to organize and be repre-sented by a collective bargaining agent as guaranteed by the codes of fair competition provided in the law. But the law was quickly challenged, and two years later in Schechter v. U.S. (the Sick Chicken case) the Supreme Court declared the NRA unconstitutional. Senator Robert Wagner, Democrat from New York, who authored much of the most important New Deal labor legislation, revived Section 7(a) and expanded it into the National Labor Rela-tions Act, commonly called the Wagner Act, which Con-gress approved in 1935. 2 Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin The Wagner Act again brought the national government into the collective bargaining process on the side of labor-ers. The purpose of the new labor policy, as stated in the preamble to the act, was to eliminate the causes of cer-tain substantial obstructions to the free flow of com-merce ...

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  The State and Labor in Modern America

  • Melvyn Dubofsky(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  5 The New Deal Labor Revolution, Part 1, 1933–1936

  In the late winter of 1933 few Americans knew precisely what to expect of their new president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Labor leaders shared the common perplexity. And they also shared the common fears concerning an economy in which between 13 million and 15 million men and women were jobless and in which by March 3, one day before the inauguration, most banks had closed their doors. Both the nineteenth-century model of entrepreneurial capitalism and Herbert Hoover’s “cooperative” version had failed; the future of the people’s republic itself appeared to be in doubt. “Even the iron hand of a national dictator,” lamented the Republican governor of Kansas, Alfred M. Landon, “is in preference to a paralytic stroke.”1

  More than most Americans, the labor leaders knew what they wanted from the new administration. Most of all, they desired to rebuild the relationship that had existed between the AFL and the federal government during the previous Democratic administration of Woodrow Wilson. They expected the Department of Labor to serve as a conduit to the White House for trade unionism’s policies and goals. Again they looked to a Democratic Congress to enact laws protective of working people and their labor movement. And again they relied on a friendly president to promote the growth of trade unionism under the aegis of the AFL.

  Roosevelt seemed precisely the chief executive that labor wanted. His previous federal experience had occurred as an assistant secretary of the navy in the Wilson administration, a position in which he had been a central actor in the implementation of wartime labor policy. As governor of New York from 1928 through 1932, Roosevelt had maintained excellent relations with the state’s labor movement, proved his strong commitment to protective factory and welfare legislation, and used his executive power and influence to succor the unemployed during the Great Depression. As candidate for president in 1932, he rallied those labor leaders customarily sympathetic to the Democratic party around his banner, and he dispatched a special emissary to inveigle the support (if not the open endorsement) of John L. Lewis.2

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  The Democratic Wish

  Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government, Revised Edition

  • James A. Morone(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  Even labor's victories, such as the Clayton Antitrust Act, had been turned against workers. The AFL's strategy was forged by calculations drawn from past defeats. The Roosevelt administration may have proclaimed a new deal, but the working men and women faced a daunting and complicated task. Industry continued to oppose them—and massive unemployment made 152 The Reconstruction of Working-Class Politics jobs scarce and troublemaking workers expendable. Liberals may have won the White House, but the conservatives still sat in the courts. And, most troublesome, the terms of worker representation—the or-ganization and strategies of the labor unions themselves—left little room for bold reforms in working-class politics. NEW DEAL LABOR POLICY AS DEMOCRATIC WISH: FROM NRA TO THE WAGNER ACT By 1933, one out of four workers—13,000,000 people—was unem-ployed. 23 Half of manufacturing units in America were shut. The value of industrial and railroad stock had declined 80 percent. 24 Full-time employment in the largest American industrial corporation, U.S. Steel, charted the economic fall: 225,000 in 1929, 54,000 in 1931, 19,000 in 1932, and none on 1 April 1933. Countless anecdotes chron-icle the misery: children without pants or shoes in Philadelphia, 50 men fighting over a pail of garbage in Chicago, wages of four cents an hour in Detroit. 2 '* When the Roosevelt administration took power, at least four differ-ent solutions were on the political agenda. The rejected alternatives are as illuminating as the recovery program that finally emerged. Perhaps the most popular answer was public works. Private con-struction spending had plummeted from $13 billion to $2.8 billion. Public works, it was argued, would boost the construction industry, put people to work, and stimulate demand. Even before Roosevelt was elected, the Hearst newspapers were campaigning for a $5.5-billion public program.

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  Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents

  Seeking Social Change in the Twentieth Century

  • Martin Halpern(Author)
  • 2003(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  178 Unions, Radicals, and Democratic Presidents The majority of employers in the United States have been extreme in their antiunion animus throughout most of the history of the country. Prior to the 1930s, workers were able to effectively combat this hostility and establish union power only in specific local and regional labor mar- kets. Unions were able to develop power as national collective bargaining agents during the 1930s due to a militant labor upsurge and radical changes in the nation's labor law. It is important to understand the 1930s transformation and the subsequent reversal of both U.S. labor law and internal union politics in order to understand labor's present dilemma. The U.S. labor movement in the 1920s was weak, crippled by court injunctions, and dominated internally by conservatives. With the onset of the Great Depression, the Communist party led a strong protest move- ment against unemployment and strengthened its base among the work- ing class. Strikes were few during the first three years of the depression, but the American Federation of Labor (AFL) achieved an important vic- tory against the crippling antiunion injunction tool with the passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1932. With the onset of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in 1933, there was both broadened left activism by a number of left parties and organizations and the growth of old and new trade unions. The synergy between grassroots activism and the New Deal led in 1935 to a radical revision in labor law and the founding of a powerful new labor movement, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), in which left- ists played important roles in the leadership and at the grass roots. The Wagner Act outlawed company unions and other management "unfair labor practices" that interfered with the self-organization of workers. For the first time, the law required the employer to bargain in good faith with a union chosen by a majority of workers as their sole collective bargaining agency.

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  Only One Place of Redress

  African Americans, Labor Regulations, and the Courts from Reconstruction to the New Deal

  • David E. Bernstein, Neal Devins, Mark A. Graber, Neal Devins, Mark A. Graber(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Duke University Press Books

    (Publisher)

  five * New Deal Labor Laws as we have seen, New Deal–era amendments to the Railway Labor and Davis-Bacon acts significantly harmed particular segments of the African American workforce. Broader New Deal labor laws, including provisions of the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Wagner Act, damaged African American workers more generally. These laws at best failed to take account of the interests of African Ameri-cans, and at worst were enforced in a discriminatory manner. ∞ Overall, their effect was to cartelize the labor marked to the disadvantage of Afri-can Americans. Under constitutional standards extant when Franklin Roosevelt was elected in 1932, the New Deal labor laws both exceeded the federal gov-ernment’s power and violated the Lochnerian right to liberty of contract. By 1937, however, the Supreme Court acquiesced to the New Deal. While the New Deal Court expressed a newfound willingness to protect ‘‘dis-crete and insular minorities’’ from state-sponsored discrimination, ≤ this did little to protect African Americans from New Deal labor legislation that had subtle discriminatory intent and indirect discriminatory effects. For the most part, African Americans were left at the mercy of political winds, which were not clearly blowing in their favor at the time. Fortunately for African Americans, the political winds shifted in the ensuing thirty years sufficiently to permit them to salvage the tremendous civil rights victories of the 1950s and 1960s. Nonetheless, the discrimina-tory effects of the New Deal lingered. the national industrial recovery act The National Industrial Recovery Act ( nra ), passed during the famous first hundred days of the Roosevelt administration, had the potential to Only One Place of Redress 86 impair African American workers’ ability to participate in the labor mar-ket permanently.

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