1941: Labor Legislation

Aside from legislation affecting labor included in purely war measures, such as the provision of the Selective Service Act empowering the Government to take over defense plants on strike, the year 1941 was free of important additions to the labor law of the country. In many fields, developments in defense and war activities aroused considerable interest in legislation, but action was deferred. Interruptions to munitions production by strikes proved the most fertile source of proposed legislative action. Congress considered and debated a variety of measures dealing with strikes and organized labor. Many of these proposals were concerned with the legality of strikes against defense production and were aimed to postpone or prohibit strikes. Another type was aimed to curb the excesses of organized labor, to ensure the more democratic management of unions, and to devise means which would require unions to expose their finances to public audit. But all such measures, largely because of opposition to them by the President and his advisers, failed of enactment.

As in the year before, much consideration was given to our social security legislation. The prospect of difficult problems of readjustment in the post-war period kept alive proposals to extend the coverage of existing laws and, perhaps, to raise the contributions to the social insurance funds by employers and employees. To ensure closer control over the country's labor supply, the state employment services were all centralized and brought under Federal authority. Many regarded this action as a first step toward federalizing the existing state unemployment insurance administrations, a proposal which was indeed made by high Federal officials.

Another year passed without legislation designed to amend or reform the statutes from which such administrative agencies as the National Labor Relations Board derived their authority. In January the Attorney General's committee on administrative agencies made its report and among the reforms it proposed was the separation of the judicial and prosecutive functions of such agencies. But Congress, having defeated the Walter-Logan Bill in 1940, took no action in this regard in 1941. The National Labor Relations Board, regarded by many critics as the principal offender against accepted judicial processes, made some reforms in its internal management, but it still arrogated to itself unusual powers.

In spite of the great pressure for war production, the hours provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act remained intact. As the work-week was increased, employees received penalty overtime rates for more and more hours. The Administrator of this Act, meanwhile, extended its provisions to industries and occupations hitherto regarded as intra-state, and in this he was in the main sustained by the courts.

Decisions of the United States Supreme Court continued to uphold the constitutionality of measures of social reform and the acts of administrators charged with enforcing these reform laws. In February the Court affirmed the constitutionality of the Fair Labor Standards (wages and hours) Act. In most of its decisions dealing with the powers of the Labor Relations Board, it continued to allow the Board the widest of latitude in interpreting and applying the Wagner Act. One of the most far-reaching judgments was in the Phelps-Dodge case, where the Court sustained the Board's decision holding it an unfair practice to deny a job to an employee because of union membership, even though he had not before worked for the employer in question. The Court's rulings in cases involving the application of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to union policies and actions were most favorable to the unions and seemed to render them immune to the terms of this law. See also LABOR ARBITRATION; STRIKES; UNITED STATES: Supreme Court Decisions; WAGES, HOURS AND WORKING CONDITIONS.