The great labor changes of the 1930s, in the wake of the Roosevelt administration inauguration in the spring of 1933, took two forms. The first was not law or regulation at all. Anything but that. It consisted of the emergence of stoppages of considerable dimension in cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, and San Francisco, where the longshore strike was to emerge in 1934 (in both Seattle and San Francisco there was the possibility of a general strike, idling workers in many industries). Ambitious initiatives were now undertaken by both general unions (the Teamsters), as well as industrial unions, nascent labor organizations whose militancy frequently outstripped their counterpart American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft affiliates.

In developing the substantive law under the NLRA the Court addressed the scope of the NLRB’s powers -- to order specific remedies, to disqualify “company unions, and to define what counted as an appropriate bargaining unit. The Court’s decisions were influced by the highly politicized environment around and within the NLRB, and especially by its obvious bias in favor of the more liberal Congress of Industrial Unions and against the more conservative American Federation of Labor.

This chapter first scans the historical context of the “labor question” in the United States and the radically diverse interpretations and experimentation with “industrial democracy,” widely seen as the answer.Second, it outlines how industrial democracy ultimately came to have meaning through collective bargaining, with the enactment of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and how optimism about the law’s promise and achievements turned into disenchantment. Third, the essay sketches the glimmerings of industrial democracy’s revival, with the labor question’s reemergence.Creative experimentation is underway, older notions are being reimagined, collective action is on the rise, and the threat posed by worker’s diminished bargaining power is a matter of public debate.