The rigid outlook of its supporters assured the KCIR’s emphatic defeat, which was broadly discrediting to labor courts. The positions taken against the KCIR also reveal the contours of the labor policy ultimately developed in the United States. The KCIR’s fascist premises were apparent by 1926, when the US made a decisive turn away from industrial compulsion. The evolutionary view of law was categorically rejected in the Wolff decision; Wolff’s decade of doctrinal ascendency ended an era of innovative state policy leadership in the United States. The procedural outlook of the KCIR’s liberal critics became the basis of New Deal labor policy, ushering in America’s unique model of labor law without labor rights. In rejecting these tenets of the KCIR, leading thinkers also turned away from international policy developments that shared those premises. Thus, America’s divergence from the labor policy of the rest of the world owed to the development of ideas, no less than institutions and structures, and it was liberals most engaged with global flows of ideas who did the most to turn the United States onto its distinctive path.

Circumstances for labor after the pandemic resemble those of the early 1920s: fragmented, labor-unfriendly law has severely curbed the growth of unions under economic conditions and a climate of public opinion remarkably favorable to new organizing. Supreme Court rulings on contracts, employment, unions, and administrative power are restoring many features of law to the conditions before the New Deal. States are the most promising governmental level for protecting organizing and widening its reach in the immediate future; reformers of the 1920s provide a model for an engaged approach to scholarship that can shape state policy. Revisiting the state legal and policy history of the early twentieth century is urgently needed to prepare for foreseeable effects of further Supreme Court reaction, and to explore the era’s remarkable diversity of policy design, which may bring to light both ideas and dormant law useful in addressing labor’s contemporary challenges.

The great labor changes of the 1930s, in the wake of the Roosevelt administration inauguration in the spring of 1933, took two forms. The first was not law or regulation at all. Anything but that. It consisted of the emergence of stoppages of considerable dimension in cities like Minneapolis, Seattle, and San Francisco, where the longshore strike was to emerge in 1934 (in both Seattle and San Francisco there was the possibility of a general strike, idling workers in many industries). Ambitious initiatives were now undertaken by both general unions (the Teamsters), as well as industrial unions, nascent labor organizations whose militancy frequently outstripped their counterpart American Federation of Labor (AFL) craft affiliates.

In developing the substantive law under the NLRA the Court addressed the scope of the NLRB’s powers -- to order specific remedies, to disqualify “company unions, and to define what counted as an appropriate bargaining unit. The Court’s decisions were influced by the highly politicized environment around and within the NLRB, and especially by its obvious bias in favor of the more liberal Congress of Industrial Unions and against the more conservative American Federation of Labor.

This chapter first scans the historical context of the “labor question” in the United States and the radically diverse interpretations and experimentation with “industrial democracy,” widely seen as the answer.Second, it outlines how industrial democracy ultimately came to have meaning through collective bargaining, with the enactment of the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and how optimism about the law’s promise and achievements turned into disenchantment. Third, the essay sketches the glimmerings of industrial democracy’s revival, with the labor question’s reemergence.Creative experimentation is underway, older notions are being reimagined, collective action is on the rise, and the threat posed by worker’s diminished bargaining power is a matter of public debate.