Do you know that it used to be legal for employers in their United States to make their employees sign a contract promising not join a union?
Such agreements were often referred to as “Yellow Dog Contracts.”
Organizers in the labor movement said you would have to be no better than a “yellow dog” to go to work under such an agreement.
The term started to be used in Labor newspapers in the 1920's.
In 1921, the editor of the United Mine Workers journal argued that such a contract “reduces to the level of a yellow dog any man that signs it, for he signs away every right he possesses under the Constitution and laws of the land and makes himself the truckling, helpless slave of the employer.”
Yet thousands of workers faced the choice between unemployment and signing away the right to organize.
Needing to feed themselves and their families, they went to work under the repressive contracts.
Such agreements were particularly prevalent in the coal mining industry.
And so on this day in Labor History the year was 1932. Yellow Dog contracts were made illegal in the private sector.
The act was named after its sponsors, progressive Republicans Nebraska Senator George W. Norris and New York Representative Fiorello LaGuardia.
Section 2 of the act declared that a worker would “have full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of his own choosing, to negotiate the terms and conditions of his employment, and that he shall be free from the interference, restraint, or coercion of employers of labor, or their agents.”
The passage of this and other laws in the 1930's helped usher in the greatest period of growth in the US Labor Movement.
Labor History in 2:00 brought to you by the Illinois Labor History Society and The Rick Smith Show