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  • Hired Hands or Human Resources? Case Studies of HRM Programs and Practices in Early American Industry by Bruce E. Kaufman
  • Ken Fones-Wolf
Bruce E. Kaufman. Hired Hands or Human Resources? Case Studies of HRM Programs and Practices in Early American Industry. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. xi + 254 pp. ISBN 978-0-8014-4830-0, $57.95 (cloth).

How do American companies think about the employment relationships that they develop with their workers? Are they simply hired hands, equivalent to any other tool of production, employed when needed at whatever rates the market will bear and then just as quickly let go? Or are they valuable company assets, managed so as to improve their usefulness, gain their cooperation, and ensure their continued importance? What are the strategic benefits to the profitability of the company of thinking systematically about gaining the loyalty, [End Page 234] cultivating the efficiency, enhancing the security, and improving the satisfaction of the company’s workforce? These were some of the questions that corporations had to consider as they began to adapt to the impersonality of the rapidly growing scale of production and size of the enterprise in the heyday of American industrialization, roughly from the 1870s to the 1930s.

There is probably no more prolific guide to the way that American corporations answered those questions than Bruce E. Kaufman. This book is a follow-up to his earlier Managing the Human Factor (2008), in which he covered the swirl of events, personalities, and ideas that “led a small band of innovative, pioneering companies to transform the way they managed their employees” (1). Here, Kaufman uses the case-study method to chart the innovations as well as the unevenness of their implementation over a critical fifty-year period. Part I uses existing historical literature to chart the choppy progress of what only later came to be called human resource management. Drawing upon studies of the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad, the Pullman Car Company, Baldwin Locomotives, Fulton Bag and Cotton Company, Filene’s Department Stores, the coal industry, and U.S. Steel and Ford, Kaufman shows that companies experimented with and chose from an array of factors that they hoped would stabilize relations, decrease turnover, improve efficiency, stifle unions, and improve profitability. Higher wages, profit sharing, internal promotions, training programs, centralized hiring and job categorization, company housing and stores, and mechanisms for employee input were among the things tried, in varying combinations, to modernize and humanize the employment relationship. However, as the case studies demonstrate, coverage was spotty, implementation varied widely, and most companies continued to rely on labor supply and market conditions to determine the terms and conditions of employment. There is little new in this section, but it provides the background and context for the remainder of the book.

The most important material is in Part II, which consists of chapters on the first human resource management consulting firm, Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc. (IRCI), and case studies undertaken by the firm of the practices in six companies between 1920 and 1930. While IRCI’s case studies demonstrate just how much industrial relations practices changed after World War I, the most fascinating part of the book is the chapter on IRCI itself. The firm owed its existence to John D. Rockefeller and the brutal industrial relations policies he followed at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company and at Standard Oil of New Jersey (SONJ). In the wake of the Ludlow Massacre (1914) and war-time strikes at Bayonne, New Jersey, Rockefeller hired William Lyon Mackenzie King (CF&I) and Clarence Hicks (SONJ) to install progressive labor management practices in his companies. He then [End Page 235] established what became IRCI to extend these practices to his family’s other industrial concerns, first under King’s leadership, but subsequently under Raymond Fosdick. Under Fosdick’s leadership, IRCI visited and wrote reports on Rockefeller-owned companies and then became an independent consulting firm in 1926, employing the “best-known practitioners and academic experts of that era on matters of personnel management and employer-employee relations” (106). The goal of IRCI was to promote the best and most progressive practices through consulting, research, and training...

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