Catherwood LibraryILR School

On July 5, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act into law, establishing collective bargaining for private-sector employees. The following decade, opponents of the Act introduced hundreds of bills to repeal or amend the law. Every single attempt failed until the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in 1947 by a Republican-controlled Congress, restricting the activities and power of unions. The Republican Party fervently opposed FLSA from its inception, and conservative groups like the American Liberty League were very vocal about their efforts to repeal these so-called socialist efforts. In addition to encouraging employers not to comply with the Act, opponents supported the widespread filing of injunctions in order to keep the NLRB from functioning effectively. These efforts were eventually put to an end in 1937 when the Supreme Court upheld the act’s constitutionality in NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. Some labor groups, notably the American Federation of Labor (AFL), also opposed the NLRB for different reasons. The AFL alleged that the Board favored the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) when it chose plant-wide elections to be the standard rather than electing by individual craft units, which the AFL favored. The NLRB eventually compromised several years later under pressure from Congress, allowing craft unions to seek separate representation of specialized worker groups while another union campaigned to certify an inclusive unit at the same place of employment. This year’s anniversary arrived at a dubious time for organized labor, just a week following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Janus v. AFSCME, which dealt a massive blow to public-sector unions, and just months after the ban on so-called “micro-unit” organizing, which is exactly what the CIO fought so hard to secure more than a half-century ago.