718
Opinion of the Court
[and] to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing . . . ." Act of July 5, 1935, § 7, 49 Stat. 452, and it defined "employee" expansively (if circularly) to "include any employee," § 2(3). We therefore held that supervisors were protected by the Act. Packard Motor Car Co. v. NLRB, 330 U. S. 485 (1947). Congress in response added to the Act the exemption we had found lacking. The Labor Management Relations Act, 1947 (Taft-Hartley Act) expressly excluded "supervisors" from the definition of "employees" and thereby from the protections of the Act. § 2(3), 61 Stat. 137, as amended, 29 U. S. C. § 152(3) ("The term 'employee' . . . shall not include . . . any individual employed as a supervisor"); Taft-Hartley Act § 14(a), as amended, 29 U. S. C. § 164(a) ("[N]o employer [covered by the Act] shall be compelled to deem individuals defined herein as supervisors as employees for the purpose of any law, either national or local, relating to collective bargaining").
Well before the Taft-Hartley Act added the term "super-visor" to the Act, however, the Board had already been defining it, because while the Board agreed that supervisors were protected by the 1935 Act, it also determined that they should not be placed in the same bargaining unit as the employees they oversaw. To distinguish the two groups, the Board defined "supervisors" as employees who "supervise or direct the work of [other] employees . . . , and who have authority to hire, promote, discharge, discipline, or otherwise effect changes in the status of such employees." Douglas Aircraft Co., 50 N. L. R. B. 784, 787 (1943) (emphasis added). The "and" bears emphasis because it was a true conjunctive: The Board consistently held that employees whose only supervisory function was directing the work of other employees were not "supervisors" within its test. For example, in Bunting Brass & Bronze Co., 58 N. L. R. B. 618, 620 (1944), the Board wrote: "We are of the opinion that, while linemen do direct the work of [other] employees, they do not exercise substantial supervisory authority within the
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