The Changing Character Of American Industrial Relations

Originally published in 1986, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations became an immediate classic, creating a new conceptual framework for understanding contemporary insutrial relations in the United States. In their introduction to the new edition, the authors assess the evolution of industrial relations and human resource practives, focusing particularly on the policy impoications of recent changes. They discuss the diverse forms of work restructuring in the American economy, the reasons why the diffusion of participatory work reorganization has been so modest, work practices among sophisticated nonunion employers, union membership declines, and public policy debates.

Ch. 1. A Strategic Choice Perspective on Industrial Relations -- Ch. 2. Historical Evolution of the U.S. Collective Bargaining System -- Ch. 3. The Emergence of the Nonunion Industrial Relations System -- Ch. 4. Industrial Relations Systems at the Workplace -- Ch. 5. The Process and Results of Negotiations -- Ch. 6. Changing Workplace Industrial Relations in Unionized Settings -- Ch. 7. Union Engagement of Strategic Business Decisions -- Ch. 8. American Workers and Industrial Relations Institutions -- Ch. 9. Strategic Choices Shaping the Future.

Excerpt from Will the New Industrial Relations Last?: Implications for the American Labor Movement This paper reviews changes occurring in the u.s. Industrial relations system at the workplace, in collective bargaining, and at the level of strategic decision making within business and labor organizations. By relating these current developments to longer term pressures on the post New Deal industrial relations system, we suggest that the system is undergoing fundamental transformation. To adapt to these changes unions will need to redefine their roles at the workplace by reorganizing work and fostering worker participation, adjust their wage bargaining objectives to promote employment continuity and compensation systems that are more closely tied to firm performance, and play a more direct and central role in business strategy decisions within the firm. These changes at the micro level of industrial relations are only likely to be successful if macro economic policies are reformed to provide a more supportive role for labor movement in society. Thomas A. Kochan is a professor in the Industrial Relations Section, mit Sloan School of Management. He received his ph.d. In industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin and was previously on the faculty of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. He is currently directing a collaborative project involving the faculty and students in the Industrial Relations Section titled u.s. Industrial Relations in Transition. This paper draws heavily on the tentative conclusions of that research. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Discussion of labor-management history and industrial democracy; explores the history of American industrial democracy from psychological, political, institutional, and social perspectives.

Bruce Kaufman provides a detailed exploration of the historical development of the field of industrial relations. He identifies two distinct schools of thought evident since the field's origins in the 1920s, one centered in the study of personnel management and the other in the study of institutional labor economics. The two schools advocate contrasting approaches to the resolution of labor problems. Kaufman traces their development from a golden age in the 1950s through a period of gradual decline that accelerated in the 1980s. He contends that, in the process, the field narrowed from a broad-based consideration of the employment relationship to a more limited focus on collective bargaining.