The NLRA, enacted in 1935, is the cornerstone of labor relations and collective bargaining in the United States, providing the basic framework governing private sector labor-management relations. It provides employees the right to form unions and bargain collectively and requires employers to recognize employee unions that demonstrate support from a majority of employees and to bargain in good faith. The act includes the payment of back pay and the reinstatement of employment as remedies for certain violations of the act. It also created an agency called the National Labor Relations Board (Board) to administer and enforce the act. Subsequently, in 1947, the Taft-Hartley Act and the Landrum-Griffin Act in 1959 amended the NLRA, among other things, to clarify coverage under the NLRA, prohibit certain union activities, and set requirements on union governance. Together, these statutes established the basic policies and procedures under which most private sector collective bargaining still operates today. Although the NLRA applies in general to all “employees,” certain groups of workers are excluded from its provisions, either by express statutory language in the original act and its amendments or by Board or judicial interpretation. Among the groups of workers excluded from the act are (1) supervisors and managers; (2) independent contractors; (3) employees of certain small businesses; (4) domestic workers; (5) agricultural workers; and (6) federal, state, and local government employees. These categories of excluded workers have been defined through various tests, which the Board can apply to determine coverage of the act. For example, the act sets forth a three-part test for determining supervisory status. Employees are statutory supervisors if (1) they hold the authority to engage in any 1 of 12 listed supervisory functions—hire, transfer, suspend, lay off, recall, promote, discharge, assign, reward, or discipline other employees or responsibility to direct them, to adjust their grievances, or effectively to recommend such action; (2) their exercise of such authority is not of a merely routine or clerical nature, but requires the use of independent judgment; and (3) their authority is held in the interest of the employer. While the NLRA underpins much collective bargaining activity in the United States, other federal, state, and local statutes also provide bargaining rights to many individuals excluded from the NLRA, particularly government workers and agricultural workers. The bargaining rights and procedures under these statutes generally differ from those under the NLRA, with variation in important areas such as what may be bargained for, and how disputes are handled. For example, many state laws covering public employees prohibit the right to strike, while the NLRA does not. We estimate that about 103 million workers had collective bargaining rights in their primary job in February 2001. These workers constituted about 77 percent of the 135 million people in the civilian workforce. The percentage of workers with bargaining rights varied among industries and between the private and public sector. As certain workers are not covered under the NLRA but rather under various other federal, state, and local statutes, not all workers—particularly agricultural workers and public sector workers—have rights equivalent to those under the NLRA. Nearly an estimated 90 million private sector workers had collective bargaining rights, about 78 percent of all persons who worked for private employers. (See fig.1.) The percentage of covered private sector workers varied by industry, with certain industries having coverage below 70 percent—agriculture/forestry, construction, and finance/real estate. Coverage also varied between the private and public sectors, with overall coverage among government workers (about 66 percent of 20 million workers) markedly lower than that among all private sector workers. Figure 2 compares the number of workers with bargaining rights with the total number of workers, by industry. Coverage varied largely with the proportion of excluded workers across each industry. However, in general, the industries with the lowest coverage rates were also those with a greater proportion of independent contractors. (See fig. 3.) Among public sector workers, uneven coverage among states led to the relatively low percentage of workers with bargaining rights. While 26 states and the District of Columbia have laws that provide collective bargaining rights to essentially all public employees, 12 states essentially do not have any laws for collective bargaining among state and local employees. The remaining 12 states have laws that provide bargaining rights to specific groups of workers (e.g. state workers, teachers, or firefighters) but not to all state and local government workers. Among workers with bargaining rights, most are covered by the federal NLRA. However, other federal, state, or local statutes cover some private sector workers as well as those public workers who currently have rights. While some of these statutes provide broader rights than those available under the NLRA, other statutes offer substantially fewer rights than those provided by the NLRA. Although we did not attempt to either catalog or assess the other bargaining statutes, we did outline some of their key differences. Within the private sector, airline and railroad employees have somewhat different collective bargaining rights than other workers. Airline and railroad employees are covered by the federal Railway Labor Act, a law that predates the NLRA by 9 years. Among other differences, the Railway Labor Act applies to “all subordinate officials,” thereby permitting many supervisory employees to join in collective bargaining. While agricultural workers are excluded from the NLRA, nine states provide these workers with bargaining rights. However, these statutes vary from the NLRA’s provisions. For example, in Arizona the state agricultural statute has different standards for bargaining unit determination than the NLRA. California also has different standards for bargaining unit determination than the NLRA and allows agricultural workers to use secondary boycotts, actions prohibited under the NLRA. Within the public sector, where federal, state, and local government workers rely on an array of federal, state, and local statutes for bargaining rights, most workers are prohibited from striking. Although some states allow certain workers the right to strike for at least some employees,many states provide compulsory binding interest arbitration (a procedure unavailable under the NLRA that requires an arbitrator to resolve differences in the event of an unsettled dispute between the union representing the employees and the employer). We estimate that about 32 million workers currently do not have any collective bargaining rights. These workers include over 25 million private sector workers—8.5 million independent contractors, 5.5 million employees of certain small businesses, 10.2 million managers and supervisors (including 8.6 million first-line supervisors), 532,000 domestic workers, and 357,000 agricultural workers. Those groups without rights also include over 6.9 million federal, state, and local government employees. In general, these workers do not have bargaining rights under any federal or state statute. About 7 percent (8.5 million) of all private sector workers classified themselves as independent contractors in February 2001. The percentage of independent contractors in private sector industries varied widely. For example, for the construction sector this figure was 19 percent and for the manufacturing sector it was 1.5 percent. (See fig. 3.) Although the NLRA specified that its provisions applied to employees, it was not until the 1947 Taft-Hartley amendments that “independent contractors” were expressly excluded from the act. Traditionally, the Board and the Supreme Court have looked at the factual circumstances underlying the relationship between the worker and the employer to determine whether the worker is an independent contractor or an employee. Although the NLRA provides the Board with broad jurisdiction, the Board’s jurisdiction does not extend to retail employers with annual dollar sales volumes less than $500,000 and many non-retail employers with sales volumes less than $50,000. Since the standards were modified in 1958, the annual dollar sales volumes in the standards have remained unchanged. We estimate in February 2001 that about 5 percent (5.5 million) of private sector workers were employed in firms with dollar sales volumes below the Board’s jurisdictional reach. For most industries, the percentage of employees excluded under these standards is very small—less than 1 percent for mining, construction, and manufacturing. However for retail trade, the $500,000 sales limit excludes about 12 percent of all workers in that industry (about 2.6 million workers). The standards also exclude 11 percent of the workers in the finance/real estate sector (mainly real estate brokers) and 4 percent of service workers. (See app. I.) We estimate that about 10.2 million (including 8.6 million first-line supervisors) of 115 million private sector workers were either first-line supervisors or higher-level managers in February 2001. This group comprised about 9 percent of the total private sector labor force. Although the original NLRA, as enacted in 1935, was silent on the exclusion of supervisors and management officials, early Board rulings interpreted the NLRA as excluding managers from its protections. However, whether supervisors—particularly the first-line supervisors (or the so-called “foremen”)—should be excluded as managerial officials was much debated in the years following the enactment of the NLRA in 1935. In 1947, the Taft-Hartley amendments to the NLRA specifically excluded supervisors from coverage of the NLRA. The Board and the courts continue to interpret the act as excluding managers. Domestic workers—“domestic servants” employed by any homeowner or resident of the home in which the services are rendered—have been expressly excluded from NLRA since 1935. Moreover, most if not all states that enacted labor relations acts similar to the NLRA expressly excluded domestic workers. In February 2001, there were about 658,000 domestic workers in private households. However, about 20 percent of these workers were classified as wage employees working as independent contractors. Therefore, in our analysis, these workers were counted as independent contractors, while the remaining 532,000 were considered domestic workers.