Rights, Not Interests: Resolving Value Clashes under the National Labor Relations Act
James A. Gross
Abstract
This book makes four important contributions to our understanding of U.S. labor law and policy. First, given my previous three volume study of the work of the NLRB, this book is able to discuss the Board’s path under Chairmen Gould, Truesdale, Battista and Liebman in historical context. Second, this book demonstrates the consequences of applying different and conflicting values to real world issues of labor law. Third, the book’s inward assessment of U.S. labor law and policy using international human rights principles as standards for judgment constitutes new perspectives on old issues. These ... More
This book makes four important contributions to our understanding of U.S. labor law and policy. First, given my previous three volume study of the work of the NLRB, this book is able to discuss the Board’s path under Chairmen Gould, Truesdale, Battista and Liebman in historical context. Second, this book demonstrates the consequences of applying different and conflicting values to real world issues of labor law. Third, the book’s inward assessment of U.S. labor law and policy using international human rights principles as standards for judgment constitutes new perspectives on old issues. These new perspectives challenge the commonly held view among practitioners and academics that workers’ organizing and collective bargaining are merely tests of economic power by adversarial interest groups exercising commercial rights not human rights. Finally, rather than joining those writing obituaries for the Act and the NLRB, this book maintains, despite the unrelenting pounding of hostile forces, that the core of the Act remains a solid foundation for the realization of workers’ rights–but calls for a new more creative vision because more is needed than merely fine tuning for marginal adjustments.
Keywords:
National Labor Relations Board (NLRB),
Workers’ Rights,
Labor Law & Policy,
Human Rights,
Wagner-Taft Hartley Act,
Values,
Politics,
Ideology
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2017 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501714252 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: September 2018 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501714252.001.0001 |
