Unions, the High-Wage Doctrine, and Employment

Abstract

In the more than 200 years in which formal organizations of workers (labor unions) have existed in the United States, there have been three distinct eras of policy toward them. Initially, in the late 18th and early 19th century, they were regarded as associations that came under the purview of the English common-law doctrine of conspiracy—that is, their very existence could be considered illegal, regardless of the objectives of the group. The first significant departure from that doctrine came in 1842, in a Massachusetts court. In Commonwealth v. Hunt, the conspiracy doctrine was rejected. That decision generally was accepted in other state courts, and it ushered in a period of neutrality with respect to the very presence of an organization of workers. The specific acts of labor organizations were still actionable, but not the existence of the organization itself. However, the law did not provide protection or encourage labor organizations. This posture became the status quo for nearly a century until the 1930s, when public policy shifted in the direction of offering an explicit mechanism to facilitate worker organization, while providing protection for such groups once they came into being. The changes were embodied in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, popularly known as the Wagner Act. With the passage of this legislation, the present era of public protection of labor unions was created. Why this happened, and its impact on the American economy, are the subjects of this article.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.