FAIR LABOR STANDARDS ACT (FLSA)

Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)

Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA)

The decline of organized labor in the United States, and to a lesser degree in other developed economies, has occasioned a vast and still-growing volume of explanatory and speculative literature. (Henderson, 2003)

Among the causes for this decline that have been examined are: (1) the changing demographic structure of the work force; (2) a relative decline in the industries of densest organization; (3) the impact of international competition; (4) the geographical migration of industry from union-friendly to unfriendly territory; (5) the provision by government of many of the previous objectives of labor unions; (6) the intensification of employer opposition, obsolescence of labor law and its weak enforcement; (7) the governmental antagonism toward the labor movement; and (8) the inability of unions to deliver their promised benefits.

While all of these insights are useful, they address unionization as a natural state. They seek to explain the absence of unionization rather than to focus on the objectives that many workers, at many times and in varying circumstances, have sought to attain through organization. Which have changed--the objectives, or the means of pursuing them? (Milkovich, 2005)

For a long time, it has been an article of faith within U.S. labor-policy circles that, given a reasonable opportunity, employees would choose to organize in order to manifest an independent voice in workplace rule-making. That expectation, and the accompanying assumption that only employer opposition was blocking employees from their natural preferences, was the motivation for the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. It guaranteed to workers the right to choose their collective-bargaining representative by majority vote, and required employer recognition and good-faith bargaining. Though the Taft-Hartley amendments of a dozen years later guaranteed the right not to organize as well, workers still have that basic legal right to unionization, if they choose to exercise it with sufficient vigor. The fact that, even at the peak of favorable conditions, no more than 35 percent of the U.S. labor force ever chose it calls into question the presumption of worker preference for organization. Now that the organized portion of the work force has fallen to 16 percent, and the proportion in the private sector to 12 percent--less than the 15 percent of private employees who were organized before the National Labor Relations Act became law in 1935--the issue cannot be ignored. For that reason, it is worth reexamining both the ...