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This provocative book by the leading historian of the National Labor Relations Board offers a reexamination of the NLRB and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) by applying internationally accepted human rights principles as standards for judgment. These new standards challenge every orthodoxy in U.S. labor law and labor relations. James A. Gross argues that the NLRA was and remains at its core a workers' rights statute. Gross shows how value clashes and choices between those who interpret the NLRA as a workers' rights statute and those who contend that the NLRA seeks only a \"balance\" between the economic interests of labor and management have been major influences in the evolution of the board and the law. Gross contends, contrary to many who would write its obituary, that the NLRA is not dead. Instead he concludes with a call for visionary thinking, which would include, for example, considering the U.S. Constitution as a source of workers' rights.Rights, Not Interestswill appeal to labor activists and those who are trying to reform our labor laws as well as scholars and students of management, human resources, and industrial relations.

Labor unions and courts have rarely been allies. From their earliest efforts to organize, unions have been confronted with hostile judges and antiunion doctrines. In this book, Julius G. Getman argues that while the role of the Supreme Court has become more central in shaping labor law, its opinions betray a profound ignorance of labor relations along with a persisting bias against unions. InThe Supreme Court on Unions, Getman critically examines the decisions of the nation's highest court in those areas that are crucial to unions and the workers they represent: organizing, bargaining, strikes, and dispute resolution. As he discusses Supreme Court decisions dealing with unions and labor in a variety of different areas, Getman offers an interesting historical perspective to illuminate the ways in which the Court has been an influence in the failures of the labor movement. During more than sixty years that have seen the Supreme Court take a dominant role, both unions and the institution of collective bargaining have been substantially weakened. While it is difficult to measure the extent of the Court's responsibility for the current weak state of organized labor and many other factors have, of course, contributed, it seems clear to Getman that the Supreme Court has played an important role in transforming the law and defeating policies that support the labor movement.

American labor law classifies strikes according to both purpose and form. In terms of purpose, a strike over terms and conditions of employment is an economic strike while one over an employer's violations of federal labor law is an unfair labor practice strike. With respect to form, the subcategories are less clear, but the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board) and the courts have distinguished between full strikes, which receive protection under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Act), and certain categories of nontraditional strikes, such as intermittent and partial strikes, which do not. In removing such strike forms from the protection of federal labor law, the Board and courts have declined to expressly differentiate between nontraditional strikes stemming from different purposes. While unfair labor practice strikers receive greater protection from replacement by employers, neither the Board nor the federal courts have allowed for expansion of the scope of protected nontraditional strike activity for such strikers. Instead, the Board and courts have at times skirted the question of whether a separate standard is necessary, developing elusive exemptions from the traditional rule to protect workers engaged in these strikes. The justifications for finding certain forms of nontraditional strikes unprotected under the Act stem from a theory that such labor action should be left to the free play of economic forces. This Note argues that the scope of protected forms of concerted activity available to unfair labor practice strikers should be broader given that these strikes' primary purpose is not to wage an economic battle but, alternatively, to compel an employer to comply with the requirements of existing labor law.

Congress, through the 1947 addition of section 10(j) to the National Labor Relations Act, authorized district courts to grant preliminary injunctive relief for unfair labor practices if they deem such relief \"just and proper.\" To this day a circuit split persists over the correct interpretation of this \"just and proper\" standard. Some circuits interpret \"just and proper\" to require application of the traditional equitable principles approach that normally governs preliminary injunctions. Other circuits interpret \"just and proper\" to require an analysis of whether injunctive relief is necessary to preserve the National Labor Relations Board's remedial power. This Note examines the justifications behind these two interpretations in light of section 10(j)'s statutory structure—most notably, the use of the just and proper standard in two other provisions of the National Labor Relations Act. It also considers the legislative history of section 10(j) and the public policy consequences underlying Congress's mandate granting the Board exclusive jurisdiction to seek injunctive relief in court under section 10(j). This Note argues that an examination of these factors reveals that Congress intended for courts to focus their section 10(j) analysis on the preservation of the National Labor Relations Board's remedial power rather than on traditional equitable principles.

At the outset of the Thatcher/Reagan era, the employment and labor law systems across six Anglo-American countries could be divided into three pairings: the Wagner Act model of the United States and Canada; the Voluntarist system of collective bargaining and strong unions in the United Kingdom and Ireland; and the highly centralized, legalistic Award systems of Australia and New Zealand. The authors argue that there has been growing convergence in two major areas: First, of labor law toward a private ordering of employment relations in which terms and conditions of work and employment are primarily determined at the level of the enterprise; and second, of individual employment rights, toward a basket of minimum standards that can then be improved upon by the parties. The greatest similarity is found in Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Ireland retains a greater degree of public ordering, while the United States diverges in favoring the interests of employers over those of employees and organized labor. The authors explore reasons for the convergence.

In the 1930s, fewer than one in one hundred U.S. labor union members were African American. By 1980, the figure was more than one in five.Black and Blueexplores the politics and history that led to this dramatic integration of organized labor. In the process, the book tells a broader story about how the Democratic Party unintentionally sowed the seeds of labor's decline. The labor and civil rights movements are the cornerstones of the Democratic Party, but for much of the twentieth century these movements worked independently of one another. Paul Frymer argues that as Democrats passed separate legislation to promote labor rights and racial equality they split the issues of class and race into two sets of institutions, neither of which had enough authority to integrate the labor movement. From this division, the courts became the leading enforcers of workplace civil rights, threatening unions with bankruptcy if they resisted integration. The courts' previously unappreciated power, however, was also a problem: in diversifying unions, judges and lawyers enfeebled them financially, thus democratizing through destruction. Sharply delineating the double-edged sword of state and legal power,Black and Bluechronicles an achievement that was as problematic as it was remarkable, and that demonstrates the deficiencies of race- and class-based understandings of labor, equality, and power in America.

The First Amendment has long had an uneasy relationship with labor law, an area riddled with exceptions to normal protections for expressive conduct. One such exception is the ban on secondary boycotts and the encouragement thereof. In 1951, the Supreme Court held this ban not to violate the First Amendment. Last October, in 'NLRB v. International Ass'n of Bridge, Structural, Ornamental, and Reinforcing Iron Workers, Local 229' (Local 229), the Ninth Circuit used this precedent to enforce a cease-and-desist order against Local 229. The court erred in concluding that no developments in First Amendment law warranted revisiting the precedent. Such a holding perpetuates an inconsistency in the law, with courts invoking the First Amendment when - but only when - it is to the detriment of unions.

Why is the United States the only advanced capitalist country with no labor party? This question is one of the great enduring puzzles of American political development, and it lies at the heart of a fundamental debate about the nature of American society. Tackling this debate head-on, Robin Archer puts forward a new explanation for why there is no American labor party--an explanation that suggests that much of the conventional wisdom about \"American exceptionalism\" is untenable. Conventional explanations rely on comparison with Europe. Archer challenges these explanations by comparing the United States with its most similar New World counterpart--Australia. This comparison is particularly revealing, not only because the United States and Australia share many fundamental historical, political, and social characteristics, but also because Australian unions established a labor party in the late nineteenth century, just when American unions, against a common backdrop of industrial defeat and depression, came closest to doing something similar. Archer examines each of the factors that could help explain the American outcome, and his systematic comparison yields unexpected conclusions. He argues that prosperity, democracy, liberalism, and racial hostility often promoted the very changes they are said to have obstructed. And he shows that it was not these characteristics that left the United States without a labor party, but, rather, the powerful impact of repression, religion, and political sectarianism.