1 What Can We Learn from NLRA to Create Labor Law for the 21st Century?

Congress enacted the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 to provide private sector workers with a way to choose to unionize or not, to engage in concerted action free from employer interference, restraint, or coercion, and to bargain collectively with their employers. The NLRA intended to replace the costly organizational or recognition fights that historically marred US labor relations with a “laboratory conditions ” electoral process for ascertaining worker attitudes toward union representation that would be free from employer pressures or dishonest statements by employers or unions. If workers chose a union to represent them, the law obligated employers to bargain in good faith with the union but it did require the employer to reach a collective agreement with it. A firm could reject unions demands and reduce wages and benefits if it deemed that in its interests.1 When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the NLRA bill, he said that it “should serve as an important step toward the achievement of just and peaceful labor relations in industry."2 Keynes in his February 1, 1938 letter to Roosevelt endorsed collective bargaining as a mode for restoring full employment, presumably by putting a floor on deflation and raising consumer spending.3 The main architect of the Act, Senator Robert Wagner of New York, intended the unfair labor practices provisions to prevent the egregious behavior of firms that he had seen when he was Chair of the National Labor Board under the Nationa