Publication
Hofstra Law Review
Volume
26
Page
85
Year
1997
Abstract
The enactment of the National Labor Relations Act 1 ("NLRA") in 1935 was an economic and social watershed. The NLRA was the successor to section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act 2 ("NIRA"), the initial experiment in American corporatist governance. 3 The NLRA gave the United States a radically new labor policy, one dramatically more effective in facilitating union organization than its immediate predecessor. Following the path identified by the predecessor NIRA, which had contemplated a network of industry "codes," labor relations under the NLRA have developed in significant part along industry lines. 4 And until the mid-1960s, the NLRA itself generated a set of labor relations which, because they were a compound of union, industry, and government input, could accurately be described as an American version of postwar European neocorporatist approaches to labor/management relations. 5 Because organized labor's role in the national economy has steadily diminished, however, the results of collective bargaining no longer merit close government oversight. In this Article, the labor policy of the NLRA is evaluated comparatively in the light of the alternative labor policies followed in parts of Europe and in Japan.
Recommended Citation
Daniel J. Gifford, Labor Policy in Late Twentieth Century Capitalism: New Paradoxes for the Democratic State, 26 Hofstra L. Rev. 85 (1997), available at https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/faculty_articles/357.
