The purpose of the yellow dog contract is essentially to prevent employees from organizing.

(A yellow dog contract is a labor organizer's derisive term for an agreement by employees not to join a union.)

"Dad was in part fascinated," his daughter says, "but he wanted some control over the film, and people kept sending him what he called a yellow dog contract."

Eighty percent of mines had reopened with the importation of replacements and the signing of yellow dog contracts by ex-strikers returning to mines.

You might try "The Yellow Dog Contract" by Ed Setrakian at the Apple Corps Theater.

In Adair v. United States (1908), the Court overruled a federal law which forbade "yellow dog contracts" (contracts that prohibited workers from joining unions).

These injunctions were often extremely broad; one injunction issued by a federal court in the 1920s effectively barred the United Mine Workers of America from talking to workers who had signed yellow dog contracts with their employers.

In addition to the layoff provisions mentioned above, the Emergency Railroad Transportation Act of 1933 also contained provisions (again drafted by Richberg) which outlawed "yellow dog contracts" and guaranteed to railway workers the right to form unions.

It also outlawed discrimination against employees for union activities, prohibited "yellow dog contracts" (in which an employee agrees not to join a union while employed), and required both sides to maintain the status quo during any arbitration proceedings and for three months after an award was issued.

Even though they were forbidden in the private sector by the Norris-LaGuardia Act in 1932, yellow dog contracts were allowed in public sector, including many government jobs, such as teachers, until the 1960s, beginning with precedent established in 1915 with Frederick v. Ownens.

While the AFL sought to outlaw "yellow dog contracts," to limit the courts' power to impose "government by injunction" and to obtain exemption from the antitrust laws that were being used to criminalize labor organizing, the courts reversed what few legislative successes the labor movement won.