The New Deal, Collective Bargaining, and the Triumph of Industrial Pluralism

This paper addresses what the author views as a prevailing misconception of labor law theorists and practitioners: that the goal of the Wagner Act was no more than the promotion of peaceful negotiating procedures and written agreements between organized interests-unions and employerspresumptively equal in power. The author argues that in fact the NLRA was drafted, and for a time implemented, with the avowed purpose of giving workers equality with employers in all aspects of industrial policy making, and that the now-prevalent approach became ascendant only after considerable conflict and the displacement of the Act's original administrators.