U.S. Labor Laws & Labor Unions

The Assimilation of Labor Unions into the Administrative Structure of American Society

The "right to work," "fair labor practices," "equal pay for equal work," and "non-discrimination" are terms that have become so integrated into the vocabulary of administrative specialists in the United States that the historical impact of those terms have become only a dim memory, usually of interest solely to the historian. This analysis will look at some of the critical labor laws of the past, and after discussing their current validity, try to determine their importance to the present-day role of the administrator. This analysis is organized in the following manner: Section 1: Labor Past and Present; Section 2: Major Labor Laws Impacting Current Administrative Theory; Section 3: The Challenges of Integration of Fair Labor Practices; and Section 4: Personal Observations.

The organized labor movement in the United States has had an extremely cyclical history, arising from obscurity at the turn of the century, it became a potent force in the 1920s, waned in power during the 1930s, became powerful again in the 1940s and 1950s, fell off again in the 1960s and 1970s, and is currently attempting to regain some of its former strengths (Gapasin & Yates, 1997, 46-49).

Gapasin and Yates (1997) analyze the challenges to American labor within the context of the 1995 AFL-CIO announcement of "New Voice" leadership which "promised no

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ects on administrators, some of which tended to give some power back to management. First, the closed union shop was made illegal. So if a company had allowed Union organization as a result of the NLRB act of 1935, it now had to restructure the Union agreements so that employment was available to non-union employees as well. Second, boycotts and support strikes by other unions were made illegal, so management had a vehicle for forcing employees back to work. Third, under Section 14(b), states now had the right to pass right-to-work laws, which enabled them to regulate the number of union shops, but also created administrative headaches since for two reasons: * There were now two sets of laws to deal with, state and Federal, which were often in conflict, but each of which required recording and reporting company policies and by-laws. * In some cases, company decisions were slowed down somewhat, because now decisions had to be made not only within the framework of potential profitability for the company, but also within the framework of legality, with the threat of lawsuit or fine always present. Two aspects of this law were positive, relatively speaking, for management: * In the case of a deadlocked labor dispute, the President

Category: Government - U