Fly Boy Knight

Interesting idea. The way I see it, this country was founded on the idea of preserving INDIVIDUAL rights. This means preserving both the employee's rights and the business owner's rights. In a purely capitalist system (Laissez-faire capitalism), the law would not take ANY side on the issues of labor disputes at all. If a union (group of employees) strong armed a company into doing something, that was their right however, on the other side of the coin, if the company decided to fire employees for being part of a strong arm, that was their right as well.

At various points in history, management had the upper legal hand and at other points, the employees had the upper legal hand but for the most part, Nobody had any legal "protection" under law because the idea was to preserve EVERYONE's individual right to engage in business stuff (again, for the most part). This was until the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 was passed. When this act was passed during the New Deal, under the NLRB, management now had a legal obligation to negotiate a contract with a duly chosen union instead of being able to fire who ever they wanted and replace them with cheaper labor.

Although this may seem like a good thing for the majority, this was a huge detriment to a business owner because they HAD to negotiate. Instead of being able to hire anyone they pleased, they were FORCED (by legal hand) to deal with these people. So really, with this act in place, the business owners were the one's whose rights the government was "taking away."

So, if you look at it that way, the fact that unions must be "allowed" to strike by the NLRB puts a check against the legal strong hold a union has on the employer. This and other concepts like requiring a "cooling off period" and allowing the government to step in during unionized labor disputes were provisions in the Taft-Harley Act of 1947 which scaled back the amount of legal "protection" unions and union members had against an employer.

Law in History of Labor Unions