Union Exemption: Nonprofit Work and the Boundaries of the Commercial Economy, 1951–1976

Abstract From 1951 to 1976, the United States National Labor Relations Board enforced a policy of union exemption, analogous to tax exemption, which categorically dismissed union petitions from workplaces deemed to have a charitable purpose. Controversies over the nonprofit sector’s place in American society during the twentieth century are well-known, but most historical analysis of this topic focuses on its political influence. Union exemption and its reversal demonstrate that the nonprofit sector’s economic status was contested too: employees, executives, and policy makers wrestled with the relationship of institutions that carried out the work of social reproduction to the structures of the postwar economy. Union exemption rested on an assumption that nonprofits and the work they did were naturally sequestered from commercial life. Its reversal signified a shift, driven by mobilizations of nonprofit employees and elite philanthropists alike, to a view of nonprofits as a “third sector” inextricably embedded in commercial life.