![]() This ruling dealt a major blow to workers’ rights. Lewis concluded that class action litigation does not fall within the NLRA’s protected activity of “mutual aid and protection.” This meant that the Federal Arbitration Act (a law that the high court misinterpreted decades earlier) allowed corporations to force workers to arbitrate workplace disputes individually by making them sign arbitration agreements as a condition of employment. History is now repeating itself labor strife is increasing, thanks in part to the rise of legal contracts that force workers to settle disputes in a rigged system of arbitration rather than an impartial court of law. The law merely sought to regulate this action for the public good, to replace strike with negotiation, conflict with cooperation. Workers engaged in, and prospered from, collective action long before passage of the NLRA. They organize, they work together, and, when their employers refuse to deal with them all at once, they strike. ![]() But workers have shown throughout history they will not abide by this unfair practice. ![]() The NLRA was designed to minimize strife by requiring employers to recognize employees’ efforts to engage in “mutual aid and protection” adjudicating conflict so as to avoid direct action and, to quote from the act itself, by “encouraging practices fundamental to the friendly adjustment of industrial disputes … and by restoring equality of bargaining power between employers and employees.”Įmployers, naturally, prefer to deal with their workers one on one. Recall the massacre of striking coal miners at Ludlow, Colorado (1914) the bloody Battle of Blair Mountain in West Virginia (1921), which pit miners against the militia and the West Coast Longshoremen’s Strike (1934) over union representation, which revealed organized workers’ enormous power over the nation’s economy. Enacted in 1935, it was set against a backdrop of decades of intense and often violent labor strife. The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) leaves no doubt about its purpose.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |