The Wagner Act

The National Labor Relations Act of 1935 — universally known as the Wagner Act, for its sponsor Senator Robert Wagner — is the most important labor law in American history. It guaranteed private-sector workers the right to form unions, to bargain collectively, and to strike, and it made it illegal for employers to retaliate against them for doing so.

Before the Wagner Act, organizing was a dangerous act that employers could crush with firings, blacklists, and private armies. The law turned the right to organize from a contested claim into a protected legal right, backed by a new federal agency, the National Labor Relations Board, to enforce it.

Passed at the height of the New Deal, the act unleashed a wave of organizing. Union membership soared over the following decade, and the great industrial unions of steel, autos, and other mass industries were built on the foundation it provided.

The Wagner Act remade the balance of power between labor and capital and underwrote the broad postwar middle class. Though later laws trimmed it back, its core guarantee — that workers may organize without fear — remains the bedrock of American labor law.