The Operation of the National Emergency Provisions of the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947

Abstract

WITH the passage of the Labor Management Relations Act of 1947,1 commonly known as the Taft-Hartley Act, the nation was launched on a vast experiment in governmental regulation of industrial relations.Certainly one of the biggest and most vital experiments in the Act related to the national emergency provisions. 2 The nation put its reliance on fact-finding boards, the injunction, and "cooling-off" periods as devices for stopping, or at least delaying crippling national strikes.Briefly, the sequence of events under the national emergency provisions is as follows:(1) When the President finds that a strike or impending work stoppage threatens the national health and safety, he may appoint a board of inquiry to make a written report to him containing the facts and circumstances of the dispute.The report must not contain any recommendations.(2) After receiving this report, the President may then direct the Attorney General to petition an appropriate district court to enjoin the actual or impending stoppage.The court may then grant an injunction of SO-days' duration, during which time the parties shall make every effort to adjust and settle their differences with the assistance of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.If settlement is reached at any time within this period, the injunction is discharged.(3) In the case of unsettled disputes, the President reconvenes the board of inquiry which submits its final report by the sixtieth day of the 80-day period, describing the parties' current positions, their efforts at settlement, and the employer's last offer.(4) Within the next fifteen days the National Labor Relations Board takes a secret ballot of the employees to determine "whether they wish to accept the final offer of settlement made by their employer."Within the reainming five days of the 80-day period, the NLRB certifies the results of the election to the Attorney General, who then requests and obtains a discharge of the injunction from the court.The parties are then free to take any action they see fit.At the same time the President is required to submit a full ]Commissioner, Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.All ideas e\pressed are the author's, and may not necessarily be attributed to the Mediation Service.1. 61

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 — 2 citations exist upstream.