During Depression, Collective Bargaining Was Centerpiece for Rebuilding Economy

During the Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt considered the National Labor Relations Act , or Wagner Act, a centerpiece of his efforts to rebuild a devastated economy. Workers' newfound organizing and bargaining rights, over time, not only helped the United States emerge from the Depression but also built America's middle class. The Employee Free Choice Act will do the same today.

FDR understood the importance of bargaining rights and union representation as he worked to restore America from the depths of the Great Depression.

In 1938, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote to FDR about the nation's economic crisis. Keynes was the economist who set out the economic principle that to achieve recovery, the federal government must invest to promote employment, production, and purchasing power. 

Keynes noted that several of FDR's action helped to produce recovery: "the solution of the credit problem, the creation of an adequate system of relief for the unemployed; public works and other investments aided by government funds" and others. But he stressed that "I regard the growth of collective bargaining rights as essential" to restoring economic prosperity.

The early days of the NLRA which brought about an unparalleled, 40-year period of organizing by workers seeking the ability to bargain for better wages and working conditions. In fact, CWA's founding union, the National Federation of Telephone Workers, doubled its membership within the first several years after the NLRA was enacted.

When President Reagan fired the nation's 11,000 air traffic controllers in 1981, employers got the message. The era of aggressive campaigns against workers who wanted to make a free choice about union representation, or bargain for better wages, was in full force. 

Since there are limited monetary and no punitive damages assessed against employers who violate federal labor law, most employers view their harassment and intimidation campaigns as the cost of doing business.

The NLRB decided in September 2007 that workers who were illegally fired by a Florida resort weren't entitled to full back pay because they hadn't sought employment within two weeks of being fired.

The Bush NLRB, from 2002 to 2007, piled up the most anti-worker record in the NLRB's 73-year history, essentially turning an agency that was charged with safeguarding management. Among the worst of those decisions:

• The NLRB weakened majority signup for workers choosing a union but approved majority signup for employer-orchestrated union decertifications. According to the NLRB's thinking, majority sign up is undemocratic when workers want a union but perfectly acceptable when they don't. 
• The NLRB allowed employers to classify a growing number of workers as supervisors, excluding them from union representation. Millions of health care and other professionals face the loss of their workplace rights with this decision.
• The NLRB denied union representation rights to thousands of workers — graduate teaching assistants, newspaper carriers, disabled workers, and others.
• The NLRB determined that intimidating statements by employers during a union campaign are "free speech." 
• The NLRB upheld firings based on an employer's unlawful surveillance. 

"Under the Bush Administration, nearly every policy choice made by a sharply divided board impeded collective bargaining, created obstacles to union representation or favored employer interests," said Wilma Leibman, a defender of workers' rights who has been named by President Obama to head the NLRB.

The Employee Free Choice Act is critical to restoring the rights workers won under the NLRA in 1935 and put an end to the illegal firings, the campaigns of harassment and intimidation and the assaults on union supporters that are all too routine.