According to Answers.com, "In 1932, Congress passed the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act in response to what many saw as the abuse of federal court injunctions in labor disputes. An injunction is a judicial order that either commands an individual to perform an act or forbids performing a particular act. As the United States became a more industrialized nation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it experienced increasing industrial strife, leading many employers to request federal courts to issue orders prohibiting the activities of strikers. For example, between 1880 and 1930, federal and state courts issued roughly 4,300 anti-strike decrees...The Norris-LaGuardia Act, unlike the ambiguously drafted Clayton Act, ensured that procedural barriers and safeguards limited the use of labor injunctions. The act declared it to be the public policy of the United States that employees be allowed to organize and bargain collectively free of employer coercion. The act treated unions as entities with rights and interests of their own. It granted unions greater authority to engage in strikes and in most cases barred altogether the issuance of injunctions in labor disputes. The Senate report on the bill stated: 'A man must work in order to live. If he can express no control over his conditions of employment, he is subject to involuntary servitude.'
Beginning in the late 1930s, the federal courts affirmed and extended the Norris-LaGuardia Act's protection of strike and boycott activities to include immunity for labor leaders not only from injunctions but also from civil actions for damages. Nevertheless, the Norris-LaGuardia Act was not as effective as it could have been because it contained no means of enforcing its provisions for labor representation, except through the courts, which sometimes proved hostile to labor's interests."
[SIDEBAR: Then the 80s came, and President Reagan put all the nails he could into the coffin of organized labor and unions.]
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