ABSTRACT
Although most European and some Asian countries have shop committees or works councils that are independent of national unions, the United States does not. In a few U.S. companies, however, one finds independent local unions, which are single-employer unaffiliated unions that represent employees of a plant or company. Most of the independent local unions in existence in the 1940s started out as employee representation plans, or “company unions,” which, as Daniel Nelson (1982) has shown, were popular in the 1920s (when they were associated with progressive welfare capitalism) and once again in the mid-1930s (when employers rapidly established them in the wake of the 1933 National Industrial Recovery Act). Few of these company unions survived until the 1940s, however. Either they became part of national unions affiliated with the AFL and CIO, or the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which initially implemented the Wagner Act’s company union ban with draconian stringency, disestablished them. Precisely how many company unions disappeared in the period between 1935 and 1940 has never been calculated; this chapter provides such an estimate.
