The Labor Act Is an Endangered Species : Labor: House Republicans seek to punish the NLRB for its efforts to enforce workplace protections.

This Labor Day marks the 60th anniversary of a statutory bill of rights for America’s workers--a policy first created by the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, and one now endangered by congressional action.

Although this New Deal legislation has been amended in significant respects--the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments outlawed certain union unfair labor practices and “national emergency” strikes and lockouts--its philosophical support for the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and the right of employees to band together for negotiations and other forms of protection remains unaltered.

The House of Representatives voted on Aug. 3 to slash by 30% the budget for the National Labor Relations Board, the agency charged with law enforcement of this policy, because of the lower chamber’s disagreement with the policy or its implementation in specific cases. If enacted, the House bill would cause horrendous delays in case handling--more than a year at the regional level alone--the closure of as many as half the board’s offices and the layoff of hundreds of valuable employees.

The House vote, seeking to revise labor law through riders to an appropriations bill, was an altogether unprecedented repudiation of a balanced approach to labor-management relationships. It was an end-run by anti-worker ideologues intent on making wholesale changes in labor laws without going through the normal deliberative legislative process. Yet, viewed alongside other developments, the House vote was not entirely unsurprising.

Some employers have become increasingly sophisticated in exploiting loopholes in the statute and obtaining delays in the administrative procedures of the NLRB. The labor policies of the Reagan-Bush era facilitated this trend and delays in legal enforcement inevitably worked against worker interest in collective bargaining and promoted disillusionment with both the process and the law that supports it.

Of course, the decline in America’s private-sector union membership--now at 10.9%--involves many more considerations than the National Labor Relations Act itself. The rise of temporary and part-time workers in the “contingent” work force, which has tripled in the past decade, has made it more difficult for unions to reach the unorganized. Millions of undocumented immigrant workers are afraid to protest violations of any labor law, let alone one that protects the right to organize.

Global competition, now fueled by deregulation as well as the rise of the Pacific Rim countries and Latin America has pressured American employment standards downward and meant job losses in labor union strongholds of auto, steel, rubber, trucking and the airlines. And no new unions have come forward, as industrial unions did in the Depression, to organize the multitudes of new high-tech and information industry employees.

The weakened state of unions and collective bargaining has clearly been a factor in the stagnation of wages since 1973. Indeed, during this past year, total compensation in the form of fringe benefits combined with wages has not kept pace with inflation for the first time since the recession of 1991-92.

Since March, 1994, when President Clinton’s appointees to the NLRB got under way, the agency has sought and obtained quick and effective relief against employer and union unfair-labor practices that might otherwise have gone unremedied through the convoluted administrative procedures established by the National Labor Relations Act.

The NLRB’s attempt to promote balanced enforcement through an environment that is both fair to both sides and also promotes genuine employee choice has invited retribution from the House through the appropriations process.

The good news is that the President has threatened to veto this legislation if it comes to the White House in this form. Fortunately, the way is still open for the Senate to persuade the House that its approach is inapproriate. Acceptance of the House bill would eviscerate worker rights and undermine the rule of law in the workplace throughout the country.