The American Prospect - On July 5, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) into law. Known as the Wagner Act, after its author, New York’s Sen. Robert Wagner, the NLRA’s passage followed decades of agitation by workers and reformers who demanded protection of workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively. During its first decade, the NLRA did more to redistribute political and economic power in the United States than any other act of government since Emancipation. The labor movement was a marginalized force in American politics and society before the 1930s. Thanks in large part to the NLRA, by the mid-1940s, unions were firmly established in the nation’s basic industries, and organized labor had reached unprecedented levels of influence and legitimacy. Organized labor in turn played a crucial role in pushing the nation toward becoming a multiracial democracy in the postwar era.
Today, it requires an exercise of considerable historical imagination to recall what a breakthrough the NLRA once represented, for on the 90th anniversary of its enactment it has been reduced to the status of a dead letter. As Donald Trump pushes through the most radical reconstruction of the federal government’s role in American life since Roosevelt’s New Deal, the ignominious fate of the NLRA, which is in effect being euthanized by the actions of Trump’s administration and the Supreme Court, has been overshadowed by many other headline-grabbing setbacks to progressivism. Yet the ignominious fate of the NLRA symbolizes better than any other development just how thoroughly the New Deal order has now been reduced to ruins and how hard the fight will be to rebuild a decent democratic society.
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