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LABOR LAW AND ECONOMICS: CASE STUDY OF THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT
Abstract
What is the relationship between economic crises and crises of the legal order? In both asking and attempting to answer that question, Marxian political economy provides the theoretical framework. The emphasis is on the establishment of collective bargaining under the control of a federal adminstrative agency--the National Labor Relations Board. The goal is to locate legal conflict in a theoretical framework explaining the production of legal doctrine in terms of class struggle, which is generated by crises in the process of capital accumulation. Analysis of legal authority (such as cases and statutes) using lawyers' reasoning by analogy and distinction demonstrates the internal dynamics of the production of legal doctrine in the United States. Legal conflict illuminates the economic, political and ideological conflicts of its time and place. Analysis of data on occurrence of strikes using social scientists' reasoning by statistical testing of hypothesized functional relationships demonstrates the Wagner Act's positive impact on organization of trade unions and the number of organizational strikes. There have been two great upsurges of class struggle in the United States during the past century--one from the 1890's through the First World War (the Progressive Era) and one from the 1930's through the Second World War (the era of F.D.R. and the New Deal). These periods have corresponded to crises in capital accumulation in which monopoly capitalists supported or at least accepted increased state intervention into the economy in order to rationalize and thereby reconstitute the accumulation process. In each of these cases, a crisis of capital accumulation generated class struggle in the workplace which in turn created a crisis of the legal order governing labor relations between workers and capitalists. The legal crisis leads to some new form of legal intervention into labor conflicts in order to help resolve the original accumulation crisis. However, the new legal framework which forms part of the solution to one crisis becomes part of the problem by the time the next accumulation crisis occurs.
Subject Area
Labor economics
Recommended Citation
PILL, MICHAEL, "LABOR LAW AND ECONOMICS: CASE STUDY OF THE NATIONAL LABOR RELATIONS ACT" (1983). Doctoral Dissertations Available from Proquest. AAI8401095.
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/AAI8401095