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Chapter 2 introduced the notion that, in some nations, labor relations is dealt with in a corporatist fashion. Under a corporatist regime, employers, unions, and governments are all actors in the evolving employment relationship. Prior to the passage of the Railway Labor Act (RLA) and the Wagner Act, with the of emergency periods such as World War I severe labor unrest in the late century, employers and unions used their sheer bargaining power to deal with each other without govern- ment involvement or intervention. In most cases, this meant employers were able to exercise substantially more power and rely on property rights to essentially crush unions except where employees controlled access to the acquisition of skills In 1926, the Railway Labor Act injected the federal government into transportation negotiations in the form of the National Mediation Board (NME). In situations where employers and unions could not agree on how an industrial conflict was to be resolved, the NMB could assist, emergency boards could be convene d, and ultimately Congress was empowered to impose solutions when the parties were unable to do so on their own. In 1936 the Wagner Act established collective bargaining as the preferred method for resolving labor disputes in situations in which a majority of employees favored it. Unlike the Railway Labor Act, the Wagner Act did not create laws and regulations for dealing with impasses but, rather, listed a set of prohibited practices for employers and left it up to the parties to negotiate a solution, taking into account their relative bargaining power. After the large number of strikes that occurred immediately before and after World War II, the Taft-Hartley Act shifted the negotiating environ- ment toward a more corporatist perspective by establishing the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) to help parties reach agreement in difficult situations, legislating rules for so-called national emergency disputes that would temporarily enjoin strikes and require fact finding, and defining a set of union unfair labor practices to balance those that employers were forbidden to use Section 8(d) of the Labor Management Relations (Taft-Hartley) Act of 1947 sets forth in one sentence the essence of collective bargaining in the United States
For the purposes of this section, to bargain collectively is the performance of the mutual obligation of the employer and representative of the employees to meet at reasonable times and confer in good faith with