National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was established with passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, also known as the Wagner Act, during the Second New Deal. The NLRB was intended to administer the NLRA’s provisions that guaranteed workers’ right to organize into independent unions to practice collective bargaining and that prohibited unfair labor practices by employers. The creation of the NLRB as a permanent, independent agency to protect the rights of workers and unions was a pivotal event in the history of American labor. Amendments to the NLRA in later years changed the duties of the NLRB to monitor unfair labor practices by unions and to restrict the involvement of Communists.

The NLRB succeeded ineffectual agencies set up to monitor Section 7(a) of the National Industrial

Shown here is a National Labor Relations Board election for union representation at the River Rouge Ford plant. (Library of Congress)

Recovery Act (NIRA) of 1933, which provided for labor’s right to collective bargaining and required employers to participate in good faith in such bargaining. These agencies (the National Labor Board, established in 1933, and the first version of a National Labor Relations Board, set up in 1934) had no real enforcement power. When the Supreme Court declared the NIRA, including section 7(a), unconstitutional, Congress passed the NLRA, and the new NLRB was created as a permanent, independent, quasijudicial agency.

The three-member NLRB had three major functions. Its first was to hold employee elections for the selection of union representation and to certify the unions winning a majority of the vote. Second, it reviewed charges and conducted hearings when necessary to determine whether management had violated the act by engaging in unfair labor practices, defined as employer conduct interfering with the right of employees to bargain collectively. The third function assigned to the NLRB was the authority to issue cease and desist orders against violators of the NLRA and also to take “affirmative action, including reinstatement of employees” in order to further enforce the act’s provisions.

The NLRB had reduced responsibilities during World War II, when the National War Labor Board had principal authority over labor relations. President Franklin D. Roosevelt also appointed more conservative members to the NLRB during the war. With the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947, union power was weakened as the NLRB’s powers were extended to cover union practices considered unfair to employers, including the use of secondary boycotts and jurisdictional strikes. The Taft-Hartley Act also required union chiefs to file affidavits proving that they were not communists in order to obtain a hearing before the new five-member NLRB, a requirement repealed by the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959.

In its early years, critics on the right complained that the NLRB sided with labor over management and with the Congress of Industrial Organizations over the American Federation of Labor. Later, critics from the left often charged the NLRB with curbing union independence; widening the definition of workers not protected by the NLRA, which included agricultural and domestic employees; and being biased against labor, especially after the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. But clearly the passage of the NLRA and the creation of the NLRB were crucial for the growth of organized labor and its power by affirming and protecting the rights of workers to organize and join unions.

Further reading: James A. Gross, The Making of the National Labor Relations Board, 1933-1937 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1974);-, The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937-1947 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981).

—Aimee Alice Pohl