What are the greatest challenges facing the American labor movement today?
Primarily, the decline of labor’s economic and political power since its zenith in the 1950s. The Wagner Act (a.k.a. National Labor Relations Act of 1935) emphasized protecting workers’ rights to organize, and the job of NLRB field examiners was to rigorously enforce that. But the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and various presidential administrations watered down NLRA protections; meanwhile, the waning influence of organized labor and the growing influence of organized management reinforced the trend. Labor has also suffered from an inability to organize more members, reflecting both its loss of political clout and its earlier emphasis on servicing existing members rather than adding new members to the ranks. Economic factors are perhaps most important. The peak of union power coincided with a period during which major employers in manufacturing, such as steel and auto, faced little international competition and basically operated as oligopolies. They were thus in a position to agree to ter
