IN an article bearing on the “legal duties of employer and employed” published in 1893 in the American Law Register, jurist Richard McMurtrie railed against the growing use of the terms “employed” and “employee” to refer to American workers. According to McMurtrie, these terms were too broad and too vague. “A passenger on a ship is the employer of the master, but there is not the faintest resemblance to that of the relationship between master and servant between them,” he explained. Instead, McMurtrie suggested that Americans should retain the words “master” and “servant,” whose meaning was very clear: a servant,...

THEY exploit the employés to the utmost to compensate themselves for the exactions of the manufacturers and the competition among themselves …. It is the judgment of the employes in the trade, and most emphatically my judgment, that any measure which does not prohibit the manufacture of clothing in any dwelling by any woman or child will wholly fail of its object.” Social reformer Florence Kelley’s sharp denunciation of the sweatshop system in the tenements of Chicago perfectly illustrated the social meaning of “employé” at the end of the nineteenth century. No worker, indeed, could have been further removed from...

ACCORDING to his autobiography, it was around 1885 that John R. Commons started the intellectual journey that later brought him to the forefront of the Progressive impulse. He was working in a printing office in Leesburg, Florida, when he stumbled on a book in which Herbert Spencer contended that according to the science of physics, it was impossible to pitch a curve ball. To the young Commons, this was an egregious mistake. “He knew not the seams on the ball and forgot the friction of the air,” Commons noted. “His was evidently a single-track mind. Ever after, I looked for...

LATE in 1938, Clarence Bolds, a foreman with Kelsey Hayes Company in Detroit, convinced some of his fellow supervisors to follow in the footsteps of the company’s workers and create a small group to defend their interests. This was a brash move on the part of first-line supervisors, who had often been instrumental in the managerial struggle against unions, but Bolds was no stranger to the labor movement. The brother of an officer of the International Typographical Union—which organized foremen—he had long held positive views of unions. Although he had earned his position as a supervisor shortly after...

SHALL I get down on my knees, or shall I bludgeon you to go over to the NLRB?” Franklin D. Roosevelt’s blunt ultimatum to William Leiserson in October 1939 revealed his determination to send the seasoned labor arbitrator to the agency created by the Wagner Act four years earlier. Leiserson himself had no inclination to leave his post at the National Mediation Board, the agency in charge of the implementation of the 1925 Railway Labor Act. Trained under the supervision of John R. Commons in Wisconsin, he believed that his expertise lay in helping managers and workers reach compromises and...

ON July 30, 1970, the UAW filed a representation petition with the NLRB, seeking to be certified as the representative of the twenty-four buyers working in the purchasing and procuring department of Bell Aerospace in Wheatfield, New York, near Buffalo. A division of Textron, Bell Aerospace was a midsize company employing 4,637 workers whose skills allowed them to sit at the heart of the military-industrial complex. The company produced engines for helicopters and rockets, a cutting-edge technological process that had earned it lucrative contracts related to the Minute Man Missile Program, which was then the pillar of the U.S. Air...

SOME controversies are carefully planned and crafted from below by activists and organizations seeking to change the established legal order. Others happen largely in spite of them. Glenn Moore, a rehabilitation counselor who worked hard in the fall of 1996 to organize the workers employed by Caney Creek, a mental health institution in Kentucky, could not have anticipated that his efforts would eventually lead to hearings inside the hallowed marble temple of justice in Washington, D.C. Indeed, none of the elements that go into a classic Supreme Court case seemed to be present in Moore’s struggle against the management of...