Law, Lawyers, and Labor: the United Farm Workers' Legal Strategy in the 1960S and 1970S and the Role of Law in Union Organizing Today
Articles LAW, LAWYERS, AND LABOR: THE UNITED FARM WORKERS' LEGAL STRATEGY IN THE 1960S AND 1970S AND THE ROLE OF LAW IN UNION ORGANIZING TODAY Jennifer Gordon* I. INTRODUCTION In the 1930s and 1940s, it was an article of faith that the National Labor Relations Act ("the Act" or "the NLRA") and the National Labor Relations Board ("the Board" or "the NLRB")-the federal statute and agency governing union organizing-were a tremendous boon to the labor movement.' Statistics bore out the intuition. Union membership exploded * Associate Professor of Law, Fordham Law School. My thanks to Fran Ansley, Craig Becker, Dorothee Benz, Jerry Cohen, Matthew Diller, Janice Fine, William Forbath, Marshall Ganz, Ruben Garcia, Caroline Gentile, Ira Gottlieb, Ellen Greenstone, Jonathan Hiatt, Staughton Lynd, Sandy Nathan, Nathan Newman, Maria Ontiveros, Russell Pearce, James Pope, Benjamin Sachs, Aaron Saiger, Linda Steinman, and George Taylor, as well as to the participants in Fordham and Hofstra Law School faculty workshops, for their thoughtful and thought-provoking comments on earlier drafts of this piece. Thanks also to Robert Gordon, Susan Sturm, and Lucie White for conversations that challenged and sharpened my ideas on aspects of the topic. I greatly appreciate the research assistance of Saru Jayaraman in 1999 and Kristi Graunke in 2000, when I first began researching the United Farm Workers' use of law, and of Cynthia Isales in 2004. This article is dedicated to the memory of Jessica Govea (1947-2005). 1. Although this view was widely held at the time, it was not universal. See "WE ARE ALL LEADERS": THE ALTERNATIVE UNIONISM OF THE EARLY 1930s 8-10 (Staughton Lynd ed., University of Illinois Press 1996) (quoting union, civil rights, and other leaders at the time of the passage of the NLRA, who expressed the concern that the Act would become an impediment to labor organization and union success).
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