Wagner Act.

Passage of the National Labor Relations Act on July 5, 1935, signaled the beginning of a national labor policy, a prolabor reform policy that the first administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, then preoccupied with the nation’s economic recovery, initially had not anticipated and about which it was ill informed. Also known as the Wagner Act—for its principal author, Senator Robert F. Wagner of New York—the new law was one of the most significant pieces of labor legislation ever enacted in the United States. Moreover, unlike the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932, which was prolabor in spirit and removed unions and their organizers from the danger of court injunctions, the Wagner Act actively placed that authority of the federal government behind economic coercions, such as strikes, believed to be essential to a vigorous and expansive labor movement. The Wagner Act also instantly provoked heated controversy both in the ranks of organized labor and in the boardrooms of many employers.