Wagner Act

The 1935 National Labor Relations Act — the legal hinge of the US union story in Kyle’s essay Unions, Unions Everywhere and the Unions concept page. It “guarantees the right of private sector employees to organize into trade unions, engage in collective bargaining, and take collective action such as strikes,” and the wiki credits it with driving union membership “from <10% to a high of almost 35% between 1935 and 1945.” Kyle’s recurring point is that the gain didn’t hold: membership eroded back toward ~10% today, driven by offshoring, globalization, automation, and corruption scandals (e.g. Jimmy Hoffa).

The Act also frames the essay’s central counter-example. Endicott-Johnson is the company where, even at the peak of nationwide unionization and “while the US was passing legislation like the Wagner Act to make organizing even easier,” 80% of the workforce voted against the union — because George F. Johnson’s “Square Deal” had already given them what unions promised. The Wagner Act thus serves as the historical baseline against which Kyle measures both the rise of organized labor and the cases where good employers made it unnecessary.

Context: The Wagner Act (named for Senator Robert F. Wagner), formally the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, is foundational US labor law: it established the National Labor Relations Board, protected workers’ rights to unionize and bargain collectively, and prohibited a defined set of employer “unfair labor practices.”

Where this appears

• Unions — cited as the legal cause of the 1935–1945 union-membership surge from <10% to ~35%, before the long decline
• Unions, Unions Everywhere — the essay’s legislative backdrop, sharpening the Endicott-Johnson anti-union vote as a case where a good employer made organizing unnecessary