Labor laws: Then and now

Our thesis is that the statutes governing labor market behavior were passed in a vastly different economic and institutional environment from that which prevails today. The underlying assumptions used to justify those laws are for the most part unrealistic in today's altered economic climate. The problems of the 1930s or the 1960s are not the problems of the 1990s, and the solutions have changed as well. We show this by exploring four areas of labor law: collective bargaining, wages and hours, income security, and civil rights.