Union Trusteeships and Union Democracy

I start from the fundamental premise that unions should be democratic. They must be democratic if they are to serve the union movement\u27s own mission and if they are to serve our society\u27s democratic values

WHAT CONSTITUTES A FAIR PROCEDURE BEFORE THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS BOARD

No administrative body in recent times has received as much criticism, both favorable and unfavorable, as has the National Labor Relations Board in its administration of the National Labor Relations Act. Such a vast amount of material has been written on the procedure before the board that any further discussion would seem superfluous. However, the discussion of the board\u27s procedure has been related more to the wisdom of choice which the board has made in setting up its procedure than to a determination of the line that separates legality from illegality in its determination of cases

The Usefulness of the Law in Obtaining Union Democracy

How effective can the law be in protecting the union members\u27 basic democratic rights of participation, due process, accountability, and equal protection? The law at present gives only halting protection to these rights. Legal relief comes erratically, giving too little, too late, and costing too much. This compels a closer scrutiny of these weaknesses to determine whether they are inherent or subject to correction

Frankfurter, Labor Law and the Judge’s Function

When the first Roosevelt was considering appointing Holmes to the Supreme Court, he wrote to Senator Lodge: Now I should like to know that Judge Holmes was in entire sympathy with our views .... absolutely sane and sound on the great national policies for which we stand in public life. The second Roosevelt needed to make no such inquiries before appointing a successor to the Holmes chair. Professor Frankfurter was not only sane and sound on the great national policies, he was one of the consulting architects in their design. Those who believed that the stultifying conservatism of the Court could be corrected by appointing men of liberal economic and social predilections rightly rejoiced. If his performance on the Court disappointed them, the fault lay not in his past but in their premises

Collective Agreements and the Law of Contracts

Professor Corbin relegated collective agreements to the periphery of contract law. His treatise briefly sketched the rights and duties created by collective agreements in a single section, placed without explanation in the chapter on Illegal Contracts, and throughout the work the application of contract rules and principles to collective agreements was either casually mentioned or wholly ignored.\u27 Professor Corbin\u27s justification for this neglect was that collective agreements were only mar-ginally relevant to the central concerns of his treatise: A collective bargain differs very greatly from the ordinary bargain of commerce, the parties to which are comparatively few, and the subject matter and purposes of which are generally very limited. The collective bargain has many features of a fundamental organizing statute, whose broad provisions control, in some degree, the activities of many individuals who may have had little or no part in its drafting and who may even have been bitterly opposed to the draftsmen. The collective bargainers cannot foresee all of the problems that are sure to arise and cannot provide for the in-numerable details of the future administration of the bargain.... This treatise does not attempt the analysis and discussion of collective bargains. They cannot be treated with advantage separately from the general subject of Labor Relations and Labor Legislation

A Summary Evaluation of the Taft-Hartley Act

AFTER ten years of Taft-Hartley, it is time to look back; but looking back can be a deadly indulgence. If we seek to justify our past, or if we long to return, we can like Lot\u27s wife be turned to a pillar of salt standing helpless on the desert. Our backward glance is deadening unless we look through the past to see guidelines for the future. Our appraisal must be more than a judgment of whether the Act has succeeded or failed it must give us wisdom to go forward. It should give us greater insight as to future steps in the development of labor law. The Act has remained substantially unchanged for ten years. This does not prove its validity, but may only demonstrate the obstacles to legislating in the field of labor-management relations. Certain defects in the statute and the need for clarifying or corrective legislation have been painfully obvious. The thicket of words in Section 8(d) which purports to define the duty to bargain has baffled the Board and the courts for ten years; the latent vacuity of Section 301, which allows suits for breach of contracts, was laid bare by the Supreme Court in the Westinghouse case; the disruptive impact of the closed shop provisions on the building trades has been uniformly recognized; the wishful optimism of the cession clause in Section 10(a) produced a foreboding fear of a no-man\u27s land between federal and state power, and now the Supreme Court\u27s barbed wire entanglements have made that fear a reality. In spite of all these patent defects, political pressures have brought no corrective action but only legislative paralysis. In this area the interests are so strong and so deeply held that the gradual evolving of legislation is impossible. We do not move by small steps but rather by sporadic leaps. The last ten years have emphasized the need to legislate with the greatest care and foresight, for even bad provisions may live long

American and European Labor Law: The Use and Usefulness of Foreign Experience,

The Supreme Court\u27s decision in J.I. Case Co. v. NLRB provides a unique and telling example of the role of foreign labor law in shaping our own labor law. The central significance of that decision to the structure of our labor law and collective bargaining makes our starting there doubly relevant. The J.I. Case Company had, for a number of years, made uniform written one-year contracts of employment with individual employees each August 1st. These contracts were not the product of any unfair labor practice, nor were they made for the purpose of forestalling unionization or collective bargaining. The United Auto Workers won a representation election and was certified by the National Labor Relations Board as the exclusive bargaining representative of the production and maintenance union, but the company refused to deal with the union in any manner affecting rights and obligations under the existing individual contracts until they expired. The N.L.R.B. found that this amounted to a refusal to bargain collectively in violation of the National Labor Relations Act. When this case came before the Supreme Court, the narrow issue was whether the existence of individual contracts precluded the making of a collective agreement covering the same issues and thereby justified the employer in refusing to bargain collectively concerning those terms until the individual contracts expired. The Court, however, did not limit itself to this narrow and rather easy issue, but addressed itself broadly to the difficult question of the nature of the collective agreement and its relation to the individual contract of employment