[1] The act was written by Senator Robert F. Wagner, passed by the 74th United States Congress, and signed into law by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

The NLRA was strongly opposed by conservatives and members of the Republican Party, but it was upheld in the Supreme Court case of NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp., decided April 12, 1937.

The 1947 Taft–Hartley Act amended the NLRA, establishing a series of labor practices for unions and granting states the power to pass right-to-work laws.

Colorado Fuel was a subsidiary of Standard Oil, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. sought expert advice from the new field of public relations to prolong the settlement of the strike.

He also recruited the former Canadian Labour Secretary (and future Prime Minister) MacKenzie King to the Rockefeller Foundation to broker a solution to the prolonged strike.

The settlement resulted in the establishment of a Management-Labor conciliation board, which evolved into a company union and template for settling labor disputes.

To achieve this, the central idea is the promotion of collective bargaining between independent trade unions, on behalf of the workforce, and the employer.

[4] encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.Various definitions are explained in section 2, (29 U.S.C.

§ 153) the NLRB has two basic functions: overseeing the process by which employees decide whether to be represented by a labor organization and prosecuting violations.

[12] Employers also engaged in discrimination against black union members by restricting their ability to organize and collectively bargain with white laborers.

The NAACP urged Senator Robert Wagner to add a non-discrimination provision to the bill to protect against union and employee race discrimination.

[13] Despite pushes from the NAACP and National Urban League to correct discriminatory practices, the law was written without the inclusion of an anti-discrimination clause.

The American Liberty League viewed the act as a threat to freedom and engaged in a campaign of opposition in order to repeal these "socialist" efforts.

This campaign continued until the NLRA was found constitutional by the Supreme Court in National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation (1937).

The American Federation of Labor and some employers accused the NLRB of favoring the Congress of Industrial Organizations, particularly when determining whether to hold union elections in plant-wide, or wall-to-wall, units, which the CIO usually sought, or to hold separate elections in separate craft units, which the craft unions in the AFL favored.

Many accused the NLRB of a general pro-union and anti-employer bias, pointing to the Board's controversial decisions in such areas as employer free speech and "mixed motive" cases, in which the NLRB held that an employer violated the Act by using misconduct that ordinarily would not result in termination to fire an employee who was engaged in pro-union activity.

Over all, they wanted the NLRB to be neutral as to bargaining power, but the NLRA's policy section takes a decidedly pro-employee position: It is declared to be the policy of the United States to eliminate the causes of certain substantial obstructions to the free flow of commerce and to mitigate and eliminate these obstructions when they have occurred by encouraging the practice and procedure of collective bargaining and by protecting the exercise by workers of full freedom of association, self-organization, and designation of representatives of their own choosing, for the purpose of negotiating the terms and conditions of their employment or other mutual aid or protection.Some of these changes were later achieved in the 1947 amendments.

Over time, the U.S. Supreme Court has gradually undone the efficacy of the NLRA by inhibiting the law from applying to shifting circumstances.