Wagner Act

Ninety years ago this summer, Congress passed legislation hailed at the time and for many years after as “labor’s Magna Carta” The Wagner Act—or, more formally, the National Labor Relations Act—was the product of Depression-era concern about the social and economic effects of industrial unrest manifest in city wide general strikes, factory take-overs, and many violent confrontations between workers trying to form unions and the police or private security forces defending the interests of anti-union employers. The architects of the Wagner Act were New Deal Democrats. They knew that a new national labor policy was needed to promote collective bargaining as a peaceful alternative to such unregulated labor-management conflict.