What does current federal law say about workers’ rights to unionize and collectively bargain?
Since 1935, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) has provided most private-sector workers the statutory right to join together with coworkers for the purposes of mutual aid and protection, including by forming or joining unions to bargain collectively with employers over wages, hours, and terms and conditions of work.
Under the NLRA, workers can form a legally recognized union in two ways:
- They can petition their employer to voluntarily recognize their union after a majority signs union cards or petitions, or
- They can file a petition for a union election administered by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and have their union certified by the NLRB after a majority vote in favor. In practice, the NLRB election process can be lengthy, and workers often face intense employer interference.
The NLRA requires employers to bargain with workers who have won a union election and prohibits employers from retaliating against workers for organizing activity. But NLRA enforcement structures are weak; employers who violate the NLRA face no monetary penalties; and workers whose rights are violated receive no compensatory damages. As a result, millions of workers seeking to unionize face daunting obstacles because the NLRA fails to reliably deter employer retaliation or to require that employers bargain in good faith to reach a contract settlement. Decades of federal policy and court decisions have further weakened the NLRA; most notably, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act legalized new forms of employer anti-union activity and allowed states to constrain collective bargaining rights through anti-union, so-called right-to-work (RTW) laws.
Moreover, many workers have never been covered by federal labor law. Jim Crow-era occupational carveouts in the NLRA continue to exclude public-sector workers, farmworkers, and domestic workers (including millions of home care and child care workers) from coverage, as well as supervisors and independent contractors. Other federal labor laws cover some other groups of workers: Rail and airline workers’ collective bargaining rights are governed by the Railway Labor Act; U.S. Postal Service employees gained collective bargaining rights in the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act; and collective bargaining rights of most other federal employees are governed by the Federal Service Labor-Management Relations Act (enacted as Title VII of the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act).
