United States. National Labor Relations Board

After the first National Labor Relations Board was functionally abolished by the Supreme Court decision invalidating the National Industrial Recovery Act, May 27, 1935, a new National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was established as an independent agency by the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act (NLRA) (49 Stat. 195), dated July 5, 1935. The Supreme Court in 1937 declared the Board constitutional and sustained Congress’s power to regulate employers whose operations affected interstate commerce, even though they were not directly engaged in commerce. The Wagner Act guaranteed the right of private sector workers to organize and bargain collectively with their employers and to participate in concerted activities to improve their pay and working conditions, with or without representatives advocating on their behalf. Employers and employees alike were protected from unfair labor practices and had an impartial forum in the National Labor Relations Board for the resolution of workplace disputes. Beyond the Board's Wagner Act powers, the War Labor Disputes Act of 1943 authorized the NLRB to intervene to settle wartime labor disputes which threatened to impede war production. The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 (popularly known as the Taft-Hartley Act), as amended, defined additional practices forbidden to organized labor and limited the NLRB generally to judicial and policy-making functions.

The NLRB was originally composed of three members and a Chairman until 1947, when the Taft-Hartley Act reorganized the Board. It expanded the Board to five members with panels of three members to discharge its responsibilities. The Board’s old review section, the group of lawyers who drafted the decisions for all the members, was abolished also in 1947, due to management groups’ accusation of a pro-labor bias. Instead, the new law provided that each member would have a personal staff of attorneys to work on pending cases. The Board was precluded from engaging in economic analysis under this Act.

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