What's Wrong With Industrial Relations?

Industrial Relations was the first multidisciplinary field in American universities, established fifty years before the next one to come along, American Studies. For almost three-quarters of a century it provided the central paradigms for the large majority of the social scientists, law professors, arbitrators, mediators, and personnel managers concerned with union-management issues and also the key figures in the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, the National War Labor Boards, and virtually all the other government commissions and boards established to regulate labor. For some scholars and professionals it still does.

In recent years faculty have challenged and reshaped nearly all of the older conceptions in the social sciences and humanities. Nothing comparable has yet occurred in the newer “studies” programs. But now Bruce Kaufman, a labor economist and director of the Institute for Personnel and Employment Relations at Georgia State University, has sharply attacked the Industrial Relations field.

To reassess Industrial Relations (or “IR,” as it is colloquially known), Kaufman adopted a historical approach, a decision which itself represents a departure. Like Kaufman, John R. Commons, the founder of labor economics in America, was not originally a historian. Yet Commons was strongly committed to historical research. “I cannot bring in... an employers’ association and a trade union, put them in a glass case... watch them tussle, higgle, settle their differences — the way Sir John Lubbock did when he studied bees and ants,” he told an audience in 1907. ¹ Commons believed that unions must shun radicalism to survive in the United States and used historical illustrations to advance his conviction. Between the world wars Commons’s protégés, such as Edwin Witte and Selig Perlman, pushed the historical approach to Industrial Relations even further.

But when the number of IR programs increased enormously after World War II, history was the least well represented among the social sciences. To be sure, IR faculty founded the journal Labor History in 1960, but their attitudes toward the history of labor were quite different than Commons’s perspective. By that time the principles of collective bargaining were ensconced in federal law, there were no more revolutionaries in labor unions, and even the mobster element had been purged from the AFL-CIO. For professors of Industrial Relations history had ended, at least insofar as the United States was concerned. There was only one reason to study history now and that was to show how hard conditions had been for workers earlier. Nothing better revealed that point than the titles of the books published by Irving Bernstein, the most accomplished IR professor of history after 1945, The Lean Years and Turbulent Years.

But the situation is utterly different today. Collective bargaining has lost most of its power in precisely those sectors of the U.S. economy most influenced by IR arbitrators — manufacturing and construction. It has languished for years even in the public sector, another area transformed by IR faculty and arbitrators. The question for Bruce Kaufman is how the IR field erred.

Kaufman’s argument is simple. In his opinion the IR field from its beginning consisted of two distinct “wings.” He calls them PM and ILE, for personnel management and institutional labor economics. According to Kaufman, mutual respect prevailed between the wings until the late 1950s, at which time the ILE professors drove their PM colleagues out. The IR field then began to wilt and today it is dying. Although trained as a labor economist, Kaufman is more sympathetic to the PM wing and regards its expulsion as a disaster.

The PM tradition originated in 1918–19, when labor turnover and strikes were reaching unprecedented levels. Often revolutionaries led those strikes. One way corporations responded to these problems was to shift responsibility for hiring and promotions from foremen to personnel managers — a new group consisting of former clergy, social workers, and college professors. Personnel managers devised new...