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33 Berkeley J. Emp. & Lab. L. 1 (2012)
How the National Labor Relations Act Was Stolen and How it Can Be Recovered: Taft-Hartley Revisionism and the National Labor Relations Board's Appointment Process

handle is hein.journals/berkjemp33 and id is 3 raw text is: Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law VOLUME 33 2012 NUMBER I ARTICLES How The National Labor Relations Act Was Stolen and How It Can Be Recovered: Taft-Hartley Revisionism and the National Labor Relations Board's Appointment Process Charles J. Morrist This article challenges and refutes the conventional wisdom that the Taft-Hartley Act changed the basic policy of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA or Act). It identifies two interrelated phenomena as factors primarily responsible for the longstanding inability of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board) to adequately protect employees in their right to unionize and engage in collective bargaining. One phenomenon is the historical revisionism that distorted perception of the Act's policy. The other is the repetitive abuse of the Board's appointment process. The article also demonstrates that the NLRB's failings resulted primarily from the agency's reluctance to vigorously enforce existing law and to utilize innovative measures currently available under the Act rather than from the Act's insufficiencies, despite the fact that the statute has many shortcomings. The article points out that although Taft-Hartley in its substantive content is a union-regulatory statute that severely reduced the power of t Professor Emeritus, Dedman School of Law, Southern Methodist University. The author expresses his special appreciation to Professors Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, Theodore St. Antoine, James Gross, and Charles Craver for their valuable and supportive comments, and to Professor Joan Flynn for her excellent historical study of NLRB appointments on which he prominently relied, and also to Sarah Ruhlen, a student at the University of Indiana School of Law, for her helpful assistance. 1

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