Labor Law

Laws governing working conditions in the United States have developed in legislatures and courtrooms. Workers have organized themselves into labor unions and have engaged in many legal battles to influence legislation locally and nationally.

Workers' early efforts to enact labor legislation and defeat anti-union proposals often occurred in state legislatures. In New York, union-led protests quashed a proposal to prohibit strikes. Across the country, business leaders actively lobbied legislators to restrict worker protections. For example, the Pennsylvania legislature limited a law requiring better ventilation and regulation of mines to Schuykill County. A few months later, more than 100 miners died in an explosion in a mine located in another county. When the legislature reconvened, miners pressured it to expand safety legislation to include the state's entire mining region.

Federal legislation began to have anti-union consequences in the late 19th century. The 1887 Interstate Commerce Act's (ICA) regulation of the railroad industry resulted in judicial oversight of railroad workers. Federal courts quickly began to use the ICA to prevent railroad workers from refusing to accept cars that belonged to companies against which other workers were striking, a practice referred to as solidarity or sympathy strikes. When railroad workers nationwide joined striking Pullman workers in 1894, an effort that halted almost all rail traffic, a federal court decided that the strike interfered with interstate commerce in violation of the ICA. After strikers refused to return to [Page 818]work, state, and federal troops were mobilized to violently quash the strike. Similarly, the Sherman Act of 1890, intended to prevent monopolies, prohibited railroad workers from striking against their employers on the theory that workers illegally restrained trade if they joined to stop a railroad's operations.

After years of overtly anti-union legislation, workers during and after World War I responded by joining radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Unlike the American Federation of Labor (AFL), the IWW recruited unskilled workers and people of color. Even after government officials suppressed the IWW, labor militancy, vividly characterized by spontaneous sit-down strikes in the nascent automobile industry, increased. In response, Congress enacted several laws ostensibly favoring workers. The Clayton Act of 1914 included a provision stating that labor was not a commodity; therefore, anti-trust laws did not ban unions. The Davis-Bacon Act of 1931 required federal contractors to pay their workers a prevailing wage. The Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 sanctioned unions' right to organize workers and strike.

In response to more frequent use of sit-down strikes and abandonment of unions affiliated with the AFL, in 1935 Congress enacted the most significant labor law to date, the Wagner Act (National Labor Relations Act [NLRA]). Intended to bring predictability to labor-management relations by formalizing the unionization process, the NLRA guaranteed workers the right to collective bargaining and created the National Labor Relations Board to mediate disputes between workers and employers. The NLRA prohibited solidarity strikes and boycotts. Twelve years later, the Taft-Hartley Act (Labor Management Relations Act) amended the NLRA by allowing the federal government to temporarily stop strikes that endanger national health or safety, a provision that has been broadly interpreted.

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