Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T23:26:18.176Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Who Is a Worker? Partisanship, the National Labor Relations Board, and the Social Content of Employment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Abstract

In opinions addressing whether graduate students, medical residents, and disabled workers in nonstandard work arrangements are employees under the National Labor Relations Act, I analyze partisan differences in how National Labor Relations Board members, under the previous two US presidents, confronted the contradictory permeation of wage-labor into relatively noncommodified relationships. I argue that Republicans mediated the contradictions by interpreting indicia of employer property rights as status authority. They constructed employment as a contractual relationship consummated through exchange relations and demarcated a nonmarket social sphere in which to locate the relationships before them. This construction suppressed the class dimension of employment and the connection between relations of production and relations in production (Burawoy 1979). Democrats mediated the contradictions by recognizing them in part and arguing that the workers were engaged in commodity production. They proposed the Act as a means for workers to negotiate “differentiated ties” (Zelizer 2005) in nonstandard employment.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2012 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

References

ARW (American Rights at Work). 2008. The Haves and the Have-Nots: How American Labor Law Denies a Quarter of the Workforce Collective Bargaining Rights. Washington, DC: ARW.Google Scholar
Atleson, James. 1983. Values and Assumptions in American Labor Law. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar
Bannister, Sarah. 2005. Low Wages, Long Hours, Bad Working Conditions: Science and Engineering Graduate Students Should Be Considered Employees under the National Labor Relations Act. George Washington Law Review 74:123–45.Google Scholar
Benner, Chris. 2002. Work in the New Economy: Flexible Labor Markets in Silicon Valley. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Braverman, Harry. 1975. Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Brody, David. 2004. Labor vs. the Law: How the Wagner Act Became a Management Tool. New Labor Forum 13 (1): 916.Google Scholar
Brudney, James. 2005. Isolated and Politicized: The NLRB's Uncertain Future. Comparative Labor Law & Policy Journal 26:221–60.Google Scholar
Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Carré, Françoise, DuRivage, Virginia, and Tilly, Chris. 1994. Representing the Part-Time and Contingent Workforce: Challenges for Unions and Public Policy. In Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, ed. Friedman, Sheldon, Hurd, Richard, Oswald, Rudolph, and Seeber, Ronald, 314–23. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press/Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Collins, Randall. 1980. Weber's Last Theory of Capitalism: A Systematization. American Sociological Review 45:925–42.Google Scholar
Cooke, William, Mishra, Aneil, Spreitzer, Gretchen, and Tschirhart, Mary. 1995. The Determinants of NLRB Decision-Making Revisited. Industrial & Labor Relations Review 48:237–57.Google Scholar
Crain, Marion. 2004. The Transformation of the Professional Workforce. Chicago-Kent Law Review 79:543616.Google Scholar
Davis, Gerald. 2009. Managed by the Markets: How Finance Reshaped America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Deakin, Simon. 2006. The Comparative Evolution of the Employment Relationship. In Boundaries and Frontiers of Labour Law: Goals and Means in the Regulation of Work, ed. Davidov, Guy and Langille, Brian, 89108. Oxford: Hart.Google Scholar
Dunn, Ryan. 2005. Get a Real Job! The National Labor Relations Board Decides Graduate Student Workers at Private Universities Are Not Employees under the National Labor Relations Act. New England Law Review 40:851–96.Google Scholar
Fisk, Catherine, and Malamud, Deborah. 2008. The NLRB in Administrative Law Exile: Problems with Its Structure and Function and Suggestions for Reform. Duke Law Journal 58:2013–86.Google Scholar
Fox, Alan. 1974. Beyond Contract: Work, Power and Trust Relations. London: Faber.Google Scholar
Gould, William. 2005. The NLRB at Age 70: Some Reflections on the Clinton Board and the Bush II Aftermath. Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law 26:309–18.Google Scholar
Gross, James. 1981. The Reshaping of the National Labor Relations Board: National Labor Policy in Transition, 1937–1947. Albany: State University of New York Press.Google Scholar
Gross, James. 1985. Conflicting Statutory Purposes: Another Look at Fifty Years of NLRB Law Making. Industrial and Labor Relations Review 39:718.Google Scholar
Gross, James. 1994. The Demise of the National Labor Policy: A Question of Social Justice. In Restoring the Promise of American Labor Law, ed. Friedman, Sheldon, Hurd, Richard W., Oswald, Rudolph A., and Seeber, Ronald L., 4558. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.Google Scholar
Gross, James. 1995. Broken Promise: The Subversion of US Labor Relations Policy, 1947–1994. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1975. Legitimation Crisis, trans. Thomas McCarthy. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Habermas, Jürgen. 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Hiatt, Jonathan, and Becker, Craig. 2005. At Age 70, Should the Wagner Act Be Retired? A Response to Professor Dannin. Berkeley Journal of Employment & Labor Law 26:293308.Google Scholar
Horwitz, Morton. 1992. The Transformation of American Law 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Kalleberg, Arne. 2009. Precarious Work, Insecure Workers: Employment Relations in Transition. American Sociological Review 74:122.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Duncan. 2006. The Rise & Fall of Classical Legal Thought. Washington, DC: Beard Books.Google Scholar
Klare, Karl. 1978. Judicial Deradicalization of the Wagner Act and the Origins of Modern Legal Consciousness, 1937–1941. Minnesota Law Review 62:265339.Google Scholar
Klare, Karl. 1982. The Public/Private Distinction in Labor Law. University of Pennsylvania Law Review 130:13581422.Google Scholar
Liebman, Wilma. 2007. Decline and Disenchantment: Reflections on the Aging of the National Labor Relations Board. Berkeley Journal of Employment and Labor Law 28:569–90.Google Scholar
Maine, Henry. 1917. Ancient Law. London: J.M. Dent & Sons.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. 2005. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, 2d ed., ed. McLellan, David. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Metzgar, Jack. 2000. Striking Steel: Solidarity Remembered. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Millis, Harry. 1950. From the Wagner Act to Taft-Hartley: A Study of National Labor Policy and Labor Relations. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Moe, Terry. 1985. Control and Feedback in Economic-Regulation: The Case of the NLRB. American Political Science Review 79:10941116.Google Scholar
Newman, Nathan. 2002. The Conflict of the Courts: Rico, Labor, and Legal Preemption in Union Comprehensive Campaigns. Drake Law Review 51:307–60.Google Scholar
Offe, Claus, and Wiesenthal, Helmut. 1980. Two Logics of Collective Action: Theoretical Notes on Social Class and Organizational Form. Political Power and Social Theory 1:67115.Google Scholar
Poggi, Gianfranco. 1978. The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Polanyi, Karl. 1957. The Great Transformation. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Rhoads, Robert, and Rhoades, Gary. 2005. Graduate Employee Unionization as Symbol of and Challenge to the Corporatization of US Research Universities. Journal of Higher Education 76:243–76.Google Scholar
Selznick, Philip. 1969. Law, Society, and Industrial Justice. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Silver, Beverly. 2008. Forces of Labor: Workers' Movements and Globalization since 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stepan-Norris, Judith, and Zeitlin, Maurice. 2003. Left Out: Reds and America's Industrial Unions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Stone, Katherine. 1981. The Post-War Paradigm in American Labor Law. Yale Law Journal 90:1509–80.Google Scholar
Stone, Katherine. 2006. Rethinking Labour Law: Employment Protection for Boundaryless Workers. In Boundaries and Frontiers of Labour Law: Goals and Means in the Regulation of Work, ed. Davidov, Guy and Langille, Brian, 155–79. Oxford: Hart.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher. 1992. Law and Power in the Employment Relationship. In Labor Law in America: Historical and Critical Essays, ed. Tomlins, Christopher L. and King, Andrew J., 7198. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Tomlins, Christopher. 1995. Subordination, Authority, Law: Subjects in Labor History. International Labor and Working-Class History 47:5690.Google Scholar
Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. 1976. Law in Modern Society: Toward a Criticism of Social Theory. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 1959. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Weber, Max. 1976. The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations. London: New Left Books.Google Scholar
Williamson, Charles. 2001. Labor Policy and the Immediate Future of the National Labor Relations Board: Comment on LeRoy. Journal of Labor Research 22:777–80.Google Scholar
Williamson, Oliver. 1987. The Economics of Organization: The Transaction Cost Approach. American Journal of Sociology 87:548–77.Google Scholar
Wright, Erik Olin. 2002. The Shadow of Exploitation in Weber's Class Analysis. American Sociological Review 67:832–53.Google Scholar
Zatz, Noah. 2008. Working at the Boundaries of Markets: Prison Labor and the Economic Dimension of Employment Relationships. Vanderbilt Law Review 61:857957.Google Scholar
Zatz, Noah. 2009. Prison Labor and the Paradox of Paid Nonmarket Work. In Economic Sociology of Work, ed. Bandelj, Nina, 369–99. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing.Google Scholar
Zeitlin, Maurice. 1980. On Classes, Class Conflict, and the State: An Introductory Note. In Classes, Class Conflict, and the State: Empirical Studies in Class Analysis, ed. Zeitlin, Maurice, 137. Cambridge, MA: Winthrop Publishers.Google Scholar
Zelizer, Viviana. 2005. The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Adelphi Univ., 195 N.L.R.B. 639 (1972).Google Scholar
Boston Med. Ctr. Corp., 330 N.L.R.B. 152 (1999).Google Scholar
Brevard Achievement Ctr., 342 N.L.R.B. 982 (2004).Google Scholar
Briggs Mfg. Co., 75 N.L.R.B. 569 (1947).Google Scholar
Brown Univ., 342 N.L.R.B. 483 (2004).Google Scholar
Cedars-Sinai Med. Ctr., 223 N.L.R.B. 251 (1976), rev'd Boston Med. Ctr. (1999).Google Scholar
Davis Memorial Goodwill Indus., 318 N.L.R.B. 1044 (1995), rev'd 108 F.3d 406 (D.C. Cir. 1997).Google Scholar
Emerson Elec. Mfg. Co., 13 N.L.R.B. 448 (1938).Google Scholar
Fibreboard Paper Prods. Corp. v. NLRB, 375 U.S. 963 (1964).Google Scholar
First Nat'l Maint. Corp. v. NLRB, 451 U.S. 666 (1981).Google Scholar
Goodwill Indus. of Denver, 304 N.L.R.B. 764 (1991).Google Scholar
Goodwill Indus. of Tidewater, 304 N.L.R.B. 767 (1991).Google Scholar
Goodwill Indus. of N. Ga., 350 N.L.R.B. 32 (2007).Google Scholar
Lechmere, Inc. v. NLRB, 502 U.S. 527 (1992).Google Scholar
Leland Stanford Junior Univ., 214 N.L.R.B. 271 (1974).Google Scholar
New York Univ., 332 N.L.R.B. 1205 (2000), rev'd Brown Univ. (2004).Google Scholar
New York Univ., 356 N.L.R.B. No. 7, slip op. (October 25, 2010).Google Scholar
NLRB v. Bell Aerospace Co., 416 U.S. 267 (1974).Google Scholar
NLRB v. Fansteel Metallurgical Corp., 306 U.S. 240 (1939).Google Scholar
NLRB v. Health Care & Ret. Corp. of Am., 511 U.S. 571 (1994).Google Scholar
NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., 301 U.S. 1 (1937).Google Scholar
NLRB v. Kentucky River Cmty. Care, 532 U.S. 706 (2001).Google Scholar
NLRB v. MacKay Radio & Tel. Co., 304 U.S. 333 (1938).Google Scholar
NLRB v. Town & Country Elect., Inc., 516 U.S. 85 (1995).Google Scholar
Oakwood Healthcare, Inc., 348 N.L.R.B. 686 (2006).Google Scholar
Packard Motor Car Co. v. NLRB, 330 U.S. 485 (1947), superseded by the Taft-Hartley Act.Google Scholar
Research Found. of City Univ. of N.Y., 350 N.L.R.B. 201 (2007).Google Scholar
Research Found. of State Univ. of N.Y., 350 N.L.R.B. 197 (2007).Google Scholar
Seattle Opera Ass'n, 331 N.L.R.B. 1072 (2000).Google Scholar
St. Clare's Hosp. & Health Ctr., 229 N.L.R.B. 1000 (1977), rev'd Boston Med. Ctr. (1999).Google Scholar
Sure-Tan, Inc. v. NLRB, 467 U.S. 883 (1984).Google Scholar

Statutes Cited

Labor-Management Relations Act (Taft-Hartley), Pub. L. No. 80-101, 61 Stat. 136 (1947).Google Scholar
Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (Landrum-Griffin), Pub. L. 86-257, 73 Stat. 519 (1949).Google Scholar
National Labor Relations Act, 29 USC §§ 151 et seq. (2010).Google Scholar
Railway Labor Act, 45 USC §§ 151 et seq. (2010).Google Scholar