Industrial Labor Relation History

Industrial labor relations have had an incredible impact on the way our society operates. Through use of unions in the better part of the 20th century, we have seen great benefits to working America. Unions have become a major aspect of American jobs and have helped form the workplace we know today. Unions struggled because of conflicting acts such as the Wagner Act and the Taft-Hartley Act, but through increased membership and awareness they have prevailed to become the well-known unions we have today. Although unions may not be as necessary in our daily lives as they were in the past, they still are used to help the average worker be treated fairly.

The original formation of unions dates back to the eighteenth century during the industrial

For workers in the industrial sector, organized labor unions fought for better wages, reasonable hours and safer working conditions. The labor movement also worked to stop child labor, give health benefits and provide aid to workers who were injured or retired (Labor Movement, 2009). The early labor movement was inspired by the conception of a just society, deriving from the Ricardian labor theory of value and from the republican ideal of the American Revolution with fostered social equality, honest labor as well as independence and citizenship (Labor Movement, 2009). Beginning with the workingmen’s parties of the 1830’s, the advocates of equal rights mounted a series of reform efforts that spanned into the nineteenth century, the most notable were the National Labor Union which was launched in 1866 and the Knights of Labor, which reached its zenith in the mid-1880’s (Labor Movement, 2009). The reform movement was viewed at odds with trade unionism, aiming as they did at the cooperative commonwealth rather than a higher wage, appealing to producers rather than to wageworkers, and revoking the trade union reliance on the strike and boycott. Contemporaries saw no contradiction; trade unionism tended to the worker’s immediate needs, the two were held to be strands of a single movement, rooted in the common working class constituency and to some degree sharing a common

Through the election of Franklin Roosevelt, the status of the American Industrial Worker would be changed. Roosevelt was interested in the well-being of workers, in 1933 Congress passed the far-reaching National Industrial Recovery Act. This Act sought to raise industrial wages, limit the hours in a work week and eliminate child labor (The Rise of Industrial Unions, 2012). One of the most important aspects of this Act is that is prohibits the companies from forcing employees to join “company” unions, and recognized the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing (The Rise of Industrial Unions, 2012). This Act drastically changed the way that the workforce viewed industrial labor and also led to massive breakthroughs in the formation of unions throughout the United