This book was first published in 1985. The enactment of the Wagner National Labor Relations Act in 1935 gave organized labor what it has regarded ever since as one of its greatest assets: a legislative guarantee of the right of American workers to organize and bargain collectively. Yet while the Wagner Act's guarantees remain substantially unaltered, organized labor in America today is in decline. Addressing this apparent paradox, Tomlins offers an examination of the impact of the National Labor Relations Act on American unions. By studying the intentions of policy makers in the context of the development of labor law from the late nineteenth century, and by looking at the course of labor history since the act's passage, Tomlins shows how public policy has been shaped to confine labor's role in the American economy. If unions want a cure for their contemporary malaise, he concludes, they must recognize that many of their problems stem from the laws which purport to protect them.
Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic is a fundamental reinterpretation of law and politics in America between 1790 and 1850, the crucial period of the Republic's early growth and its movement toward industrialism. The book is the most detailed study yet available of the intellectual and institutional processes that created the foundation categories framing all the basic legal relationships involving working people at work. But it also brings out the political and social significance of those categories, and of law's role in their creation. Tomlins argues that it is impossible to understand outcomes in the interaction between law and labor during the early Republic unless one also understands the pre-eminence that legal discourse was assuming at the time in American society as a whole, and the particular social and political reasons for that pre-eminence. Because of the breadth and novelty of its interpretation this is a book not just for those interested in the
