On July 5, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) into law. Known as the Wagner Act, after its author, New York’s Sen. Robert Wagner, the NLRA’s passage followed decades of agitation by workers and reformers who demanded protection of workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively. During its first decade, the NLRA did more to redistribute political and economic power in the United States than any other act of government since Emancipation. The labor movement was a marginalized force in American politics and society before the 1930s. Thanks in large part to the NLRA, by the mid-1940s, unions were firmly established in the nation’s basic industries, and organized labor had reached unprecedented levels of influence and legitimacy. Organized labor in turn played a crucial role in pushing the nation toward becoming a multiracial democracy in the postwar era.
Today, it requires an exercise of considerable historical imagination to recall what a breakthrough the NLRA once represented, for on the 90th anniversary of its enactment it has been reduced to the status of a dead letter. As Donald Trump pushes through the most radical reconstruction of the federal government’s role in American life since Roosevelt’s New Deal, the ignominious fate of the NLRA, which is in effect being euthanized by the actions of Trump’s administration and the Supreme Court, has been overshadowed by many other headline-grabbing setbacks to progressivism. Yet the ignominious fate of the NLRA symbolizes better than any other development just how thoroughly the New Deal order has now been reduced to ruins and how hard the fight will be to rebuild a decent democratic society.
The road to this nadir was long. Many historians date the NLRA’s decline to its amendment by the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, legislation that began to swing power back toward employers. Over the span of decades, other developments combined to further erode the act’s efficacy: Successive court rulings chipped away at its protections; employers reorganized their businesses, using subcontracting, franchising, the employment of temporary workers, and offshoring to insulate themselves from the demands of the workers whose labor made them wealthy; others simply disregarded the act’s prohibitions against firing workers who try to unionize, shrugging off its meager penalties. Employers’ growing resistance to unionization, visible most recently in Starbucks’s refusal to sign union contracts with the hundreds of coffee shops where baristas have elected union representation, eventually drove the unionization rate of the nation’s workers down from 35 percent in the early 1950s to under 10 percent today, the lowest level since the NLRA’s enactment.