BUSINESS UNIONISM VERSUS RESPONSIBLE UNIONISM - COMMON-LAW CONFUSION,THE AMERICAN STATE, AND THE FORMATION OF PRE-NEW DEAL LABOR POLICY

The emergence of the American Federation of Labor in the 1880s and its ideology of voluntarism or ''business unionism'' transformed the main stream American labor movement. Voluntarism, however, had little impac t on the formation of the pre-New Deal labor policy. I suggest that me mbers of the progressive movement developed ''responsible unionism'' a s an alternative to ''business unionism'' and that it was the progress ives' alternative that shaped later developments in labor policy. (1) Progressive state and federal court judges relied on the principles of agency, a fiduciary term, to make unions competent contracting partie s and enforce collective trade agreements. (2) Although the AFL had lo ng lobbied far anti-injunction legislation supPorted by an underlying ideology of voluntarism, the progressive Republican-Democratic coaliti on that engineered passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932 based the legislation on their notion of ''responsible unioni sm.'' These progressives interwove the principles of agency into the a ct. As a result rather than withdrawing the American state from labor- management relations, the act caused unions to begin to lose their sta tus as private, voluntary associations, thus creating the foundation f or the construction of the statist regulatory apparatus, the National Labor Relations Board, during the New Deal.