The Uprising of the 20,000 was part of a wave of strikes that blew the top off of whatever had been containing the remaining rage and militancy of workers during the Gilded Age, a time that, until around the turn of the twenty-first century, marked the greatest level of economic disparity in US history. One response to this period of great and growing labor strife was a legislative one—the National Labor Relations Act of 1935.

The NLRA was created as a system to manage industrial conflict. It, through the government agency it precipitated, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), supports labor organizing through its power to compel employers to recognize unions and bargain over working conditions. The NLRB represented a significant shift in the government’s stance with regard to unions: from repression to what has been called “integrative prevention.” The legislation marked a turning point in union density, too—membership shot up, because the government was suddenly regulating and protecting workers’ rights, and the strike wave that led to its passage died down as strikes became more limited to the bread-and-butter issues of wages and benefits that arose during contract renewal fights at already union worksites.

Of course, the NLRA is not what gives workers the right to organize. Working people have the right to assemble and can withhold their labor with or without the NRLA. They had been doing so and winning since long before 1935, both in the United States and around the world. And, anyway, almost immediately after its passage, the protections that were established by the NLRA were peeled away.