Thirty-Six Years of “National Emergency” Strikes

Abstract

PUBLIC concern over work stoppages, reflected in demands for restrictions on the strike weapon, has increased in recent years. It reached a peak in the period immediately following World War II. At that time major stoppages occurred in coal, oil refining, railroads, steel, automobile manufacturing, shipping and longshoring, telephone communications, and other public utility industries. To many people, it appeared in the latter part of 1945 and early 1946 that the economy was to be paralyzed. A natural consequence was the insistent demand for compulsory arbitration machinery to assure the public an uninterrupted flow of goods and services. Joint labor-managment opposition did not quiet the insistence that at least in public utilities and other basic industries strikes should be outlawed. Twelve states enacted such legislation for This study of national emergency strikes suggests that the incidence and dangers of such strikes are overexaggerated in the minds of legislators and the public; except in time of war, machinery to deal with emergency strikes is

The NLRA at Fifty: A Research Appraisal and Agenda

“…Research into national emergency disputes is largely of the case study type and focuses on the determination of criteria for judging whether a labor dispute constitutes an emergency and thus is covered by the Act (Ackermann 1979;Bernstein 1955;Bernstein and Lovell 1953;Chamberlain and Schilling 1954;Christenson 1953Christenson , 1955Jones 1965;Warren 1951). As Cullen (1968) has observed, this research shows that most declared emergency strikes do not have severe economic consequences, although no two authors seem to agree on what constitutes a national emergency.…”