Why there were three boards

The National Labor Relations Board of today is the third body with something like that job in three years. The first two could not make anybody do anything, and that failure is the reason the third one was built the way it was.

1933, the National Labor Board

The recovery act of 1933 gave workers, in its Section 7(a), the right to organize and bargain collectively. Many employers simply refused to recognize the unions their workers chose, and strikes followed. By August 1933 President Roosevelt created a National Labor Board to get compliance and to mediate.

Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York chaired it. It had three industry members and three labor members. It had no real power. The only sanction available was withdrawing an employer's right to display the Blue Eagle, the emblem of taking part in the recovery program, and by the time the board's authority expired in June 1934 that had been done to four employers.

It was not useless. The Board's own history records that it settled 1,019 strikes, averted 498 more, and settled 1,800 other disputes. It just could not compel anyone.

1934, the "Old NLRB"

Congress passed Public Resolution No. 44 in 1934, letting the President set up a new board inside the recovery program. It took the name National Labor Relations Board and is now called the Old NLRB to tell it apart from this one. Unlike the tripartite body before it, it had three public members and no industry or labor seats.

It was no more able to enforce Section 7(a) than its predecessor. What it did produce was a body of decisions that a national policy could later be built on. In May 1935 the Supreme Court struck down the recovery act itself, and the voluntary codes collapsed with it.

1935, the one that lasted

Wagner had already concluded that mediation was the wrong job. In February 1935 he introduced a bill for an independent agency that would enforce employees' rights rather than broker disputes: three members appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, with the power to order an employer to stop and to have that order enforced in court.

It passed the Senate in May, the House in June, and Roosevelt signed it on 5 July 1935. The first three members were sworn in that August.

Three of the Board's five seats still carry these names. The five seats.

1947, the shape it has now

Under the Wagner Act only employers could commit an unfair labor practice. Taft-Hartley, passed in 1947 over President Truman's veto, made unions subject to the same powers, and it changed the agency itself in two ways that still define it.

• The Board went from three members to five, and was allowed to sit in panels of three. The two new seats are the ones now called Murdock and Gray.
• The General Counsel was split off. For twelve years management groups had said the agency was prosecutor and judge at once. The new law created an independent General Counsel, appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, to prosecute cases separately from the Board that decides them. That office.

The Act was amended again in 1959 and in 1974, but the shape set in 1947 is the shape of the agency today.

Where this comes from

• The Board's own history pages: the NLB and the Old NLRB, the 1935 passage of the Wagner Act, and the 1947 structural changes. The figures for strikes settled and Blue Eagles withdrawn are the Board's own.
• The first members and their dates: the Board's list of members since 1935.
• The statute as it stands: 29 U.S.C. § 151 onward.