Fulfilling the Pledge: Securing Industrial Democracy for American Workers in a Digital Economy

by Roger C. Hartley

Overview

An insightful and evidence-based assessment of our urgent need to enact labor law reform—and how to achieve it.

Millions of non-union workers want unionization, but our current labor-management relations law conspires to deny them meaningful opportunities to secure collective workplace representation. The resulting low rates of collective bargaining impose economic, political, and social costs on us all. In Fulfilling the Pledge, Roger Hartley addresses the plight of American workers, who face a grim, uncertain future, as the digital workplace reshapes the hierarchical post–World War II industrial relations system that once gave workers a voice. Through empirical evidence and the lens of law and policy, Hartley examines what industrial sociologists call the chronic “representation gap” and clarifies how a wide-ranging movement could build a vocal constituency for the congressional enactment of labor law reform.

The pledge made in the 1935 National Labor Relations Act to encourage establishment of industrial democracy—where workers possess a voice in their places of work—remains unfulfilled. Speaking to policymakers, scholars, historians, and the average citizen, Fulfilling the Pledge makes a compelling case for collective workplace representation that serves the greater good, even as American labor relations law continues to undermine collective bargaining by workers and becomes an increasingly significant political and social issue.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780262377355
Publisher:	MIT Press
Publication date:	02/13/2024
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	306
File size:	521 KB

About the Author

Roger C. Hartley is Professor of Law at The Catholic University of America and an award-winning teacher of constitutional law and labor law. He is the author of four other books, including Monumental Harm: Reckoning with Jim Crow Era Confederate Monuments.

Table of Contents

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction 1

I The Unsatisfied Demand for Union Representation and the Costs of a Declining Union Movement 
1 What Do Workers Want? 9
2 The “Representation Gap” and the Societal Costs of Low Union Density 21
3 Causes: The Revolt of the Bosses 49

II The Role of Contemporary Labor Relations Law in Creating Obstacles to Workers’ Desire to Obtain Union Representation
4 The NLRA’s Restrictions on Coverage: Constricting Eligibility for Legal Protection of the Right to Organize 63
5 Opportunities in the NLRA during the Representation Process for Employer-Created Delay and Interference with Employee Free Choice 93
6 Opportunities in the NLRA for an Employer to Retaliate without Fear of Significant Consequences 117
7 Opportunities in the NLRA for Employers to Indoctrinate Employees through Work-
Time Captive Audience Meetings while Denying Unions Workplace Access to Employees 129

III The Role of Contemporary Labor Relations Law in Creating Obstacles to Employees’ Ability to Secure Favorable Collective Bargaining Terms
8 Opportunities in the NLRA for Employers to Deny Workers an Initial Collective Bargaining Agreement 141
9 Opportunities in the NLRA Permitting Employers to Destabilize Existing Bargaining Relationships 153
10 Opportunities in the NLRA Permitting Employers to Limit Workers’ Economic Actions 163

Epilogue: Searching for Solutions beyond the NLRA 179
Acknowledgments 189
Appendix: Protecting the Right to Organize Act of 2021
(H.R. 842)— Section-by-Section Analysis 191
Notes 203
Bibliography 273
Index 285

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Confirming that workers want union representation and asserting that collective bargaining is in the public’s interest, Roger Hartley’s Fulfilling the Pledge sets forth in non-legalese a long-needed, comprehensive, achievable and non-ideological program of procedural and substantive labor law reform that, if implemented, would fulfill the often-broken but never disavowed pledge of the Wagner Act that the  federal government would encourage collective bargaining and protect workers in the exercise of their freedom of association  and self-organization.”
—James Gross, Professor Emeritus, Labor Relations, Law, and History, Cornell University
 
 
“Roger Hartley’s spirited deconstruction of the way courts and employers have distorted American labor law provides a forceful argument for a radical and comprehensive reform.  His highly readable book offers workers, unions, legislators, and government officials the road map they need to envision once again the industrial democracy that was the animating ethos put forward by the framers of the 1935 Wagner Act.”
—Nelson Lichtenstein, University of California, Santa Barbara, author of A Fabulous Failure: the Clinton Presidency and the Transformation of American Capitalism