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Unions — South Carolina

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is the federal statute that regulates the triangular relationship between employers, employees and unions.

Prior to the New Deal, Congress enacted legislation curtailing the use of injunctions in labor disputes and regulating employer-union relationships in the railroad and shipping industries. In 1935, Congress enacted the first comprehensive federal statute regulating union organizational and representation rights. The stated objective of the NLRA was to reduce labor strife by granting employees the right to organize and join unions, by providing a mechanism by which these unions could obtain mandatory bargaining status and by declaring certain things employers did that were deemed destructive to this process as unfair labor practices. The NLRA clearly and admittedly was designed to promote unionization of American industry.

In 1948, Congress decided that unions also needed some regulation – duties that would counterbalance the rights given to them by the NLRA. In the Labor-Management Relations Act, more commonly known as Taft-Hartley, Congress amended the NLRA by adding some unfair labor practices applicable to unions, by imposing limits on compulsory unionism and by providing more balance to the NLRA in other respects. Except for some specialized amendments in 1957, the NLRA has remained virtually...


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