The National War Labor Board (NWLB) was created in 1918 by President Woodrow Wilson in an attempt to formalize a federal policy for dealing with organized labor during World War I. When the United States declared war on Germany, the Wilson administration, business leaders, and others believed it essential to create a war labor board to ensure that labor disputes did not disrupt war preparations. Prior to this time, the federal government’s involvement in labor disputes tended to be limited to enforcing injunctions, breaking strikes, and keeping surveillance on labor radicals. Samuel Gompers and the conservative American Federation of Labor (AFL) hoped that would change with American entry into war. War and its dependence on defense production, Gompers believed, offered a golden opportunity to ensure that responsible craft unions were allowed to organize and negotiate contracts supported by the federal government. Other labor leaders and progressives supported American participation in the war, believing the Wilson administration’s rhetoric that it was a war to make the world safe for democracy.
With the creation of the NWLB in 1918, the AFL and the Wilson administration had worked out a blueprint that would last throughout the war. The AFL agreed to a nostrike pledge and the maintenance of open shop, nonunion workplaces. In exchange, business leaders agreed to pay union wages and refrain from the worst forms of antilabor behavior that had been typical before the war. The two most prominent members of the NWLB were former president William Howard Taet and labor progressive Frank Walsh. Initially the NWLB had a fairly positive impact on organized labor as the board did in fact curtail some of the most flagrant antiunion practices, such as forcing workers to sign yellow-dog contracts that prohibited them from joining unions. Although the NWLB acted decisively in only a few dozen cases, its support of organized labor in some rulings was almost unprecedented. The impact of the NWLB, however, was short-lived. The end of World War I in November 1918 brought with it immediate employer demands for the return of prewar labor relations. Specifically, employers insisted that since the nation was no longer dependent upon defense production, it was not appropriate for the federal government to intervene on behalf of workers and organized labor. Wartime agreements in such industries as meatpacking were soon invalidated. By December 1918, the power of the NWLB had been effectively demolished.
Further reading: Joseph McCartin, Labor’s Great War: The Struggle for Industrial Democracy and the Origins of Modern Labor Relations, 1912-1921 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).
—Robert Gordon
World History
