QUOTE : Between 1880 and 1931 the courts issued more than 1,800 injunctions to suppress labor strikes. Labor “combinations” (unions) were declared a violation of due process, a way of coercively extracting wealth from decent defenseless rich employers. Collective bargaining, it was maintained, deprived both owner and worker of “freedom of contract.” By 1920, pro-business federal courts had struck down roughly three hundred labor laws passed by state legislatures to ease inhumane working conditions.