NORRIS-LA GUARDIA ACT

Signed into law by President Herbert Hoover on March 23, 1932, the Norris-La Guardia Act culminated a decades-long struggle by the American labor movement to restrict the use of anti-union injunctions in labor disputes. First introduced in the Senate by George W. Norris in 1928 and later sponsored in the House of Representatives by Fiorello La Guardia, the act presaged the National Labor Relations Act by proclaiming as the public policy of the United States support for the efforts of workers to form their own unions and engage in collective bargaining. The law severely limited the power of federal judges to issue injunctions in labor disputes and also rendered so-called yellow dog contracts, which made employment contingent upon an employee agreeing not to join a union, unenforceable in the federal courts.

The issuance of injunctions against sympathy strikes, boycotts, and other tactics used by organized labor had become increasingly common after 1880. Over four thousand such injunctions were issued between 1880 and 1930. The elimination of labor injunctions had thus become a top priority for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) after its founding in the 1880s. Leaders of the AFL believed they had accomplished this objective with the 1914 Clayton Act amendments to the Sherman antitrust law. However, subsequent judicial interpretation negated the effectiveness of the Clayton Act, so that almost as many injunctions were issued in the 1920s alone as in the previous four decades combined. Although Norris supported the AFL's basic objectives, he rejected a specific AFL proposal to make unions and labor disputes virtually immune from any form of judicial intervention. Instead, he relied on labor lawyer Donald Richberg, economist Edwin Witte, and law professors Felix Frankfurter, Herman Oliphant, and Francis Sayre to draft a more narrowly framed law that was consistent with the approach to labor law reform soon to be adopted by the New Deal.

In response to the tremendous increase in the use of labor injunctions during the 1920s and the change in political climate resulting from the impact of the Great Depression, both the House and Senate approved the Norris La Guardia Act by overwhelming margins in 1932. Although Hoover had previously opposed the bill, he grudgingly signed it, stating at the time that the courts would ultimately determine the act's constitutionality. The Supreme Court later upheld the law in Lauf v. E.G. Shiner & Co. (1938).

See Also: AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR (AFL); COLLECTIVE BARGAINING; ORGANIZED LABOR.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernstein, Irving. The Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 1920–1933. 1960.

Ernst, Daniel. "The Yellow-Dog Contract and Liberal Reform, 1917–1932." Labor History 30 (1989): 251–274.

Forbath, William E. Law and the Shaping of the American Labor Movement. 1991.

Frankfurter, Felix, and Nathan Greene. The Labor Injunction. 1930.

O'Brien, Ruth. Workers' Paradox: The Republican Origins of New Deal Labor Policy, 1886–1935. 1998.

LARRY G. GERBER