Sidney Hillman helped write the Wagner Act

Person: Sidney Hillman
Lived: 1887–1946
Field: Labour movement
From: Lithuanian-American

The story

The Great Depression devastated American unions. The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, which Sidney Hillman had led since 1914, shrank to a third or less of its former strength. Like many unions it revived after the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 promised legal protection for workers' right to organise, which brought thousands of garment workers back.

Hillman supported Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal from the start. Roosevelt named him to the Labor Advisory Board of the National Recovery Administration in 1933 and to the National Industrial Recovery Board in 1934. In those posts, as EBSCO's biography puts it, he prodded the government into accepting greater responsibility for the lives of American workers. He had long believed in industrial democracy, with government helping to mediate between labour and management, a view many AFL leaders of the time distrusted.

Hillman provided key assistance to Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York in drafting the National Labor Relations Act, often called the Wagner Act, which Roosevelt signed on July 5, 1935. The law guaranteed private-sector workers the right to organise unions, bargain collectively and strike. It banned unfair labour practices by employers, such as firing workers for union membership or refusing to bargain, and it created the National Labor Relations Board to oversee union elections and enforce the law. The Supreme Court upheld it in 1937.

Hillman also helped Labor Secretary Frances Perkins win enactment of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which set national rules on minimum wages and the length of the working week. In both cases he brought his conviction that government should take responsibility for fair labour relations.

The Wagner Act transformed American labour. It underpinned the rapid growth of unions in the mass-production industries that Hillman helped organise through the CIO. Amended over the decades, it remains the foundation of private-sector labour law in the United States, and the National Labor Relations Board it created still decides cases today.

Why it matters

The Wagner Act and the Fair Labor Standards Act, which Hillman helped bring about, protected Americans' right to organise and bargain collectively and set national labour standards.