Union Exemption: Nonprofit Work and the National Labor Relations Board, 1951-1976

John Branch, Northwestern University

The nonprofit sector in the United States grew dramatically, both in absolute terms and in relative prominence to the state and the private sector, during the twentieth century. There is a sizable historical literature about the political history of philanthropy, but we know less about nonprofits’ rise as a sector of wage labor and the unique struggles this engendered. From 1951 to 1976, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) frequently dismissed union petitions from nonprofit employees, drawing on the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act's exemption for nonprofit hospitals to argue that most charitable institutions were outside its jurisdiction. During the 1970s, the NLRB reversed course, eventually declaring in 1976 that it would no longer draw distinctions between nonprofit and for-profit employers. Such a policy of "union exemption" and its end signified a key shift in how midcentury thinkers and policymakers understood nonprofit activity–from an assumption that such institutions were naturally sequestered from the rest of commercial life, to a view of nonprofit activity as the “third sector” integrated with the rest of the postwar mixed economy. This paper examines the policy history of the NLRB’s “union exemption” and the strategies that workers at nonprofits and their allies used to agitate for its end.

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 Presented in Session 29. Social Reproduction Politics and the Boundaries of Economic Rights