The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite

by Michael Lind

In 1935 the NRA was abolished when the Supreme Court struck down its enabling legislation, on the technical grounds that Congress had delegated too much authority to the president. But the wreckage of the NRA was plundered to construct a system that structured the US economy from the 1930s to the 1970s. NRA industry codes were reborn as regulations in commission-governed industries like aviation, trucking, and coal, which were treated as public utilities. Instead of the sectoral minimum wages and working hours and pensions that were to have been agreed on in each industry by business and labor and ratified by the NRA, the federal government directly imposed a one-size-fits-all national minimum wage and eight-hour day in 1938, in addition to the federal Social Security program that was enacted earlier in 1935. The Wagner Act of 1935 turned section 7(a) of the National Industrial Recovery Act into the statute that, as amended, governs collective bargaining in the United States to this day.