Industrial Terrorism and the Unmaking of New Deal Labor Law

The passage of the Wagner (National Labor Relations) Act of 1935 represented an unprecedented effort to guarantee American workers basic labor rights--the rights to organize unions, to provoke meaningful collective bargaining, and to strike. Previous attempts by workers and government administrators to realize these rights in the workplace met with extraordinary, often violent, resistance from powerful industrial employers, whose repressive measures were described by government officials as a system of industrial terrorism. Although labor scholars have acknowledged these practices and paid some attention to the way they initially frustrated labor rights and influenced the jurisprudence and politics of labor relations in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the literature has neither adequately described the extent and intensity of this phenomenon nor fully explored its effects. This Article remedies that shortcoming. Focusing on three industries where the practice of industrial terrorism was especially well developed and its influence especially pronounced, this Article shows how the practitioners of industrial terrorism and their allies in Congress were able to turn the legacy of violence and disorder, which they authored by their violent resistance to the Wagner Act, into the basis of an extraordinary counterattack on labor rights. It shows how this attack culminated in 1947 with the enactment of the profoundly reactionary Taft-Hartley Act and remade the landscape of American labor relations

Semiclassical Approach to Structure Functions at Small x

Inclusive and diffractive structure functions for electron-proton scattering are calculated in a semiclassical approach at large momentum transfer $Q^2$ and small values of the scaling variable $x$. The basic process is the production of a quark-antiquark pair in the colour field of the proton. The structure functions are expressed in terms of Wilson lines along the classical trajectories of quark and antiquark passing through the colour field, and their covariant derivatives. Based on some rather general assumptions on properties of the colour field, inclusive and diffractive structure functions are evaluated in terms of four field dependent constants.Comment: 24 pages LaTeX, 1 figure appended as uuencoded ps-file, complete ps-file of the paper available via anonymous ftp at ftp://x4u2.desy.de/pub/preprints/desy/1995/desy95-208.p

Workers Disarmed: The Campaign Against Mass Picketing and the Dilemma of Liberal Labor Rights

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, mass picketing, characterized by large numbers of workers congregating in common protest at or near their employers\u27 establishments, emerged as a crucial weapon in a historic campaign by American workers to realize basic labor rights and build an enduring labor movement in the face of strident resistance from a powerful business community. So potent a weapon did mass picketing prove that these business interests, aided by allies at all levels of government, moved quickly to ban the tactic. From the real-world complexities of labor conflict, this coalition forged a simplistic, analytically dubious, but difficult to contest picture of mass picketing as inherently violent, oppressive, and unjustifiable, and constructed a legal regime that proscribed the tactic even when it was not accompanied by overt violence. By the late 1940s, mass picketing was effectively banned by legislatures, courts, and police. Thereafter, it ceased to serve as an effective means of labor protest. Although overlooked by labor scholars and legal historians, this successful crusade against mass picketing was a crucial event in American legal and social history. For it not only anchored a broad-ranging attack on labor rights that culminated in the 1947 enactment of the Taft-Hartley Act; it also disarmed the labor movement, leaving unions and workers unable to consolidate the rights they seized in the 1930s and 1940s and impotent against renewed attacks on labor rights that began to unfold in the 1970s and that have left the labor movement shattered. This article tells the story of mass picketing as it shaped the content of labor rights and the fortunes of organized labor from the 1930s through the present day. In so doing, the article discerns in the history of mass picketing a fundamental dilemma inherent in liberal labor rights: that liberal labor law can neither reconcile itself to the kind of working class militancy manifested in mass picketing nor survive without it

Industrial Terrorism and the Unmaking of New Deal Labor Law

The passage of the Wagner (National Labor Relations) Act of 1935 represented an unprecedented effort to guarantee American workers basic labor rights--the rights to organize unions, to provoke meaningful collective bargaining, and to strike. Previous attempts by workers and government administrators to realize these rights in the workplace met with extraordinary, often violent, resistance from powerful industrial employers, whose repressive measures were described by government officials as a system of industrial terrorism. Although labor scholars have acknowledged these practices and paid some attention to the way they initially frustrated labor rights and influenced the jurisprudence and politics of labor relations in the late 1930s and early 1940s, the literature has neither adequately described the extent and intensity of this phenomenon nor fully explored its effects. This Article remedies that shortcoming. Focusing on three industries where the practice of industrial terrorism was especially well developed and its influence especially pronounced, this Article shows how the practitioners of industrial terrorism and their allies in Congress were able to turn the legacy of violence and disorder, which they authored by their violent resistance to the Wagner Act, into the basis of an extraordinary counterattack on labor rights. It shows how this attack culminated in 1947 with the enactment of the profoundly reactionary Taft-Hartley Act and remade the landscape of American labor relations