Historians and the U.S. Industrial Relations Regime

Abstract

During the Clinton administration, for the first time in almost twenty years, the character and direction of the U.S. industrial relations regime has become a matter of serious public debate. Clinton-appointed chair of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) William Gould IV has sought with some success to revivify an agency that in the 1980s had come to seem almost superfluous. The 1994 report entitledThe Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations(Dunlop Commission) stirred debate on the role of unions in the nation's future. Organized labor has sought, with some limited success, to place such critical topics as striker replacement on the national agenda. Meanwhile, congressional conservatives have sponsored measures to curb new organizing strategies such as “salting” anti-union workplaces with union activists. Even more moderate politicians, with support from at least some sections of the labor community, have proposed measures aimed at drastic recasting of the Wagner Act's Section 8(a) (2), which outlawed company unions, so as to permit so called “team” approaches to employee representation. The shake-up in the leadership of the AFL-CIO and the federation's launching of an unprecedented program of political mobilization, which in turn has drawn Republican counterfire reminiscent of the rhetoric of the 80th Congress, increases the possibility that basic matters of federal labor policy may, after a long absence from mainstream public discourse, may return to center stage.