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This study will endeavor to present an analysis of the process in which the National Labor Relations Board gave specific meaning to "interfere with, restrain or coerce" found in section 8(1) of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Under Section 8(1) of the Act, the Labor Board, subject to judicial review, has the authority to declare illegal any management procedure which in its opinion involves interference, restraint or coercion.

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it will examine employer techniques used to thwart the rights of newly certified unions. Second, this study will attempt to determine the effectiveness of the Act's remedies. Some statistical characteristics of cases and firms involved in violations of the duty to bargain collectively will be evaluated. Statistics from the Board's annual reports as well as from a recent study by Philip Ross will be used. The increase of Board cases dealing with violations of refusal to bargain, the average number of violations per case, and the prevalence of other unfair labor practices will be examined. The size of firms committing the majority of violations of collective bargaining will be compared with the size of firms involved in the majority of Board certification elections. National Labor Relations Board, circuit court of appeals, and Supreme Court cases will be used to investigate the effectiveness of three of the most prevalent violations of the duty to bargain collectively used by employers to circumvent the purposes of the Act. They are (1) refusal to meet with the newly certified union, (2) engaging in unilateral activity, and (3) refusal to bargain in good faith. This study will also examine the effectiveness of the remedies of the Labor Management Relations Act in protecting the worker's right to bargain collectively with his employer through representatives of his own choosing. Four of the standard Board remedies will be examined---(1) posting of notices, (2) reinstatement of employees discriminated against, (3) payment of back pay, and (4) a Board order to bargain in good faith.

The National Labor Relations Act stands as one of the most influential pieces of labor legislation in the history of the United States. The Act defines the rights and responsibilities of both employers and employees. Furthermore, the National Labor Relations Act makes the State into the chief judicial body regarding labor disputes through the National Labor Relations Board. Chiefly concerned with the circumstances that led to the passage and affected the shaping of the Act, factors such as Communist organizing, racial politics of the Deep South, and internal division within the labor movement in the 1920s are examined. Specific case studies include the Auto-Lite Strike in Toledo, Ohio (1934), the Minneapolis Teamster Strike (1934), and the West Coast Longshoremen Strike (1934).

Why do employees vote for or against union representation? A survey of the scholarly literature and an investigation of National Labor Relations Board sponsored elections among Southern industrial workers were conducted to help answer this question. Four hypotheses were proposed to reveal the most important factors. No universally applicable laws were developed by the dissertation study. Although the hypotheses were supported, the response rate was very low in the field research study of sensitive issues. The field research did provide additional empirical evidence to support most of the previous research studies concerning union representation election voting behavior.

Unelected bureaucrats make a broad range of important policy decisions raising concerns of accountability in a democratic society. Many classics in the literature highlight the need to understand agency decisions at stages prior to the final vote by agency appointees, but few studies of the bureaucracy do so. To this point, scholars have treated the issue of shirking as one where laziness and inefficiency are the driving forces. However, it is more realistic to expect that shirking comes in the form of ideological resistance by administrators. I develop a theory that the independence afforded to the bureaucracy is functionally comparable to that of the judiciary, allowing for the insertion of individual attitudinal preferences by bureaucrats. Drawing from the attitudinal model of judicial research, I look at whether attitudes affect the decision making of administrative law judges at the National Labor Relations Board, the influence administrative law judge decisions have on reviewing bodies, and whether attitudinal decision making can be controlled by external political and legal actors. Results demonstrate that Democratic judges are more likely than Republican judges to rule for labor in unfair labor practice cases, administrative law judge decisions provide the basis for subsequent decisions of reviewing bodies, and that few political and legal controls exist over this set of bureaucrats. This research provides evidence that lower level bureaucrats make decisions based on their own political preferences and that these preferences have far ranging consequences for policy and law.