Broken Promise: The Subversion Of U.S. Labor Relations

Notes

Notes Preface 1. "Fact Finding Report Issued by the Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations," Daily Labor Report, special supplement, no. lOS, June 3, 1993, p. xi. 2. U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Department of Commerce, Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations, Report and Recommendations, December 1994, Washington, D.C. 3. Ibid., p. xvii. 4. Ibid., pp. xviii, 4, 7. 5. Ibid., pp. xvii, 8. 6. Ibid., dissenting opinion of Douglas A. Fraser, following p. 12. Emphasis in original . 7. Ibid., pp. 18-24. 8. For a useful discussion of these subjects, see Sheldon Friedman et al., eds., Restoring the Promise ofAmerican Labor Law (Ithaca, N.Y.: ILR Press, 1994). Chapter 1 1. James A. Gross, "Conflicting Statutory Purposes: Another Look at Fifty Years of NLRB Law Making," Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 39, no. 1 (October 1985): 10. See also Leon Keyserling, "The Wagner Act: Its Origin and Current Significance," George Washington Law Review 29 (December 1960): 215. 2. Gross, "Conflicting Statutory Purposes," p. 10. See also Leon Keyserling, "Why the Wagner Act?" in The Wagner Act: After Ten Years, ed. Louis Silverberg (Washington , D.C.: Bureau of National Affairs, 1945), p. 13. 3. James A. Gross, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937-1947 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), p. 253. See also Gross, "Conflicting Statutory Purposes," p. 12. 4. Gross, "Conflicting Statutory Purposes," p. 12. 5. Congress, Legislative History ofthe Labor Management Relations Act, 93d Cong., 2d sess., 1947, 2:1535-44. (Hereinafter Legislative History of the Taft-Hartley Act.) 6. Ibid., p. 1536. 7. Ibid., p. 1653. 287 288 Notes 8. Although legislative intent should not be inferred from the comments of the opponents of the legislation, the remarks of Congressman Emanuel Celler and the observations of the House Minority Report to the Hartley bill (H.R. 3020) are historically accurate in identifying Smith and Hartley's objectives. Celler pointed out on the floor of the House that the Hartley bill eliminated the words "collective bargaining ": "They do not appear in the purposes of the bill." He observed further: "You do away with that language by this bill and ... anybody reading this pending bill will rightfully come to the conclusion that you not only do not put an imprimatur of approval on collective bargaining but intend to abolish collective bargaining . When you read the balance of the bill you can readily see that what you want to do is to do away with collective bargaining and have individual bargaining ." Ibid., p. 776. What resulted from the conference committee negotiations was a compromise that retained with some amendment the Wagner Act's endorsement of collective bargaining and added the Hartley bill's Declaration of Policy, which made no mention of collective bargaining. 9. For an excellent description and analysis of the origins and content of the TaftHartley Act, see Harry A. Millis and Emily Clark Brown, From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1950). 10. For a useful analytical summary of events in this period, see John Patrick Diggins, The Proud Decades: America in War and Peace, 1941-1960 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1988), pp. 3-121; and R. Alton Lee, Truman and Taft-Hartley (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1966), pp. 34, 37. 11. Lloyd Ulman, "Unionism and Collective Bargaining in the Modern Period," in American Economic History, ed. Seymour E. Harris (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961), pp. 426-28. 12. Ibid., p. 427. 13. Millis and Brown deplored the imprecision of the phrase "too powerful." They asked if it meant the power to question management rules or to negotiate standardized wages, hours, and working conditions or the power to close down a huge corporation or an industry crucial to a locality or the nation. They pointed out that situations varied: "There may be powerful unions and associations of employers, as in Pacific Coast shipping; strong unions facing great corporations in mass production ; division among unions as they face nation-wide operations such as those of Western Union; unions in many areas in the eady stages of dealing or trying to deal with large chain-store companies; strong unions like the Teamsters, in highly strategic positions as they deal with thousands of employers, many of them small; a great union and associations of small employers organized in order to meet the union on a more equal footing; great textile mill chains in many...