Labor Law

Labor laws were intended to balance the bargaining power between employees and employers. It gives employees the right to unionize. It also allows employees and employers to participate in certain activities for the fulfillment of their demands, such as the following:

• Picketing

• Lockouts

• Grievances

• Strikes

• On-the-job protests

• Seeking injunctions

The labor law is administered by the federal law, state law, decisions and regulations of administrative agencies, and judicial decisions.

Difference of Labor Law from Employment Law

Labor laws were intended to primarily deal with employer-union relationships while employment laws normally deal with employer-employee relationships. Most often, these terms are used interchangeably.

The National Labor Relations Act

The National Labor Relations Act or NLRA, also known as the Wagner Act, was enacted by the United States Congress in July 1935 to regulate the labor-management relationships of business firms that are engaged in interstate commerce and to regulate on a national level union relationship and employer-employee bargaining.

The NLRA ensures the employees' rights to organize, form, join unions, and bargain together as a group with their employers without fear of management retaliation. It also guarantees them that they have the freedom to choose, whether to belong to a union or not. It compels the U.S. government to promote and encourage collective bargaining as the major way of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other protection. It is also an important method to insure peaceful industry-labor relationships.

Employers and employees who are regulated by the act are mostly those involved in businesses that affect the interstate commerce. Those that are not subject to the NLRA, their relationships may be administered by state or other federal statutes.

History of the National Labor Relations Act

The NLRA that regulates labor-management relationships was enacted in 1935, but before the enactment of the NLRA, workers already had the right to belong to trade unions and to hold back their work during industrial disputes. However, employers also had the right to keep under surveillance, cross-examine, fire, and blacklist workers for joining unions or taking part in strikes.

During the 1930's, workers began to organize militantly in large numbers, but since they were experiencing economic tough times where it was harder for a worker to find other jobs than it was for an employer to employ another worker, employees hesitated to belong to trade unions, thus, only 10% of the workforce of America was unionized in 1933.

Senator Robert F. Wagner, with the support of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, passed a bill before Congress in 1933 that would help forbid employer's unfair labor practices, that eventually became known as the National Labor Relations Act (NRLA) or the Wagner Act.

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