Organizing the Workplace

  • Class number: 35584
  • Term: Fall 2005
  • Instructor: TBA

This course will examine the legislative and judicial development of the law governing workplace organizing. Although the 1935 Wagner Act promised American workers the right to form unions 'of their own choosing,' increasingly severe legislative and judicial obstacles have confronted workers seeking to achieve that promise during the six decades following the end of World War II. This course will begin with an examination of the legal and political historical circumstances which produced the National Labor Relations Act. Particular emphasis will be placed upon the first ten years during which the developing body of Board and Court decisions shaped the early contours of American labor law as it relates to the Section 7 right to organize. Next the course will consider the legislative, regulatory and judicial responses to union organizing in the post-war and early cold-War period. We will investigate why these responses were characterized by increasingly restrictive interpretations of the law, and a concomitant increase in management legal resistance to unionizing efforts. The course will finally consider the contemporary response of many of the intended beneficiaries of the NLRA to avoid any use at all of NLRB processes and elections in organizing campaigns. The course will examine, as case studies, the highly successful efforts of some unions, notably the service employees and the hotel and restaurant employees in organizing traditionally low-income and immigrant workforces. Such success has been won through use of alternative strategies to gain union recognition without the legal processes set out in the statute. One of the central questions asked in the course is how and why statutory schemes intended to benefit certain groups, in this case un-represented workers, develop over time to become, arguably, indifferent or hostile to those beneficiaries' interests. Required final paper or project.

Course Schedule

  • Date:
  • Location: KT 215

Course Information

  • Catalog number-Section number: 690-01
  • Course Type: Seminar
  • Prerequisites: Prerequisite: Labor and Employment Law or Legal Regulation of the Employment Relationship (688).
  • Credits (min/max): 3/3
  • Subjects:

Enrollment

  • Enrollment status: Open
  • Current enrollment/capacity: 0/18
  • Reserve population/capacity: 0/0
  • Waitlist enrollment/capacity: 0/20

Grading

  • Grade basis: Graded
  • Satisifies Writing Requirement: No
  • Exam type: NO EXAM