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Corporatism in Comparative Perspective: The Impact of the First World War on American and British Labor Relations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Larry G. Gerber
Larry G. Gerber
Affiliation:
Larry G. Gerber is associate professor of history at Auburn University.
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Abstract

Historians and social scientists have often described modern America as a uniquely pluralist society in which a collective bargaining model of industrial relations won an early triumph over other conceptions of labor relations. Professor Gerber challenges this traditional view. Comparing American and British thinking and policies relating to labor relations during and just after the First World War, Professor Gerber concludes that, in large part because of the war's impact, corporatist conceptions of political economy had by 1920 achieved a wide appeal in both Britain and America. Though a pluralist conception of collective bargaining may later have become dominant in the United States, at least as of 1920 many parallels existed between the emerging “corporatist bias” of British thinking about labor relations and American thinking about this issue.

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Articles
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Business History Review , Volume 62 , Issue 1 , Spring 1988 , pp. 93 - 127
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1988

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References

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11 The MacDonald bill served as an inspiration for Julius Cohen, one of the architects of the protocol between organized workers and employers in the American clothing industry, to make a similar proposal to the United States Industrial Relations Commission in 1914. Cohen, Julius Henry, Law and Order in Industry: Five Years' Experience (New York, 1916), 202, 225-26, 288–92Google Scholar; See also Lowe, Rodney, Adjusting to Democracy: The Role of the Ministry of Labour in British Politics, 1916-1939 (Oxford, 1986), 117Google Scholar.

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20 Montgomery, David, Workers' Control in America: Studies in the History of Work, Technology, and Labor Struggles (New York, 1979), especially 91–112Google Scholar. David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards, and Michael Reich challenge Montgomery's claims regarding labor's growing concern with control issues in this period, but they themselves cite statistics that show an unprecedented percentage of workers involved in strikes dealing with “non-economic” issues in 1918 and 1920; Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (New York, 1982), 153–60Google Scholar. See also Bing, War-Time Strikes.

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22 Steve Fraser, “The ‘New Unionism’ and the ‘New Economic Policy,’” in Cronin, Work, Community, 174.

23 David Montgomery, “New Tendencies in Union Struggles and Strategies in Europe and the United States, 1916-1922,” in Cronin, Work, Community, 104-5. For an excellent discussion of the various purposes that different groups envisioned for shop committees, see Montgomery, , The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State, and American Labor Activism, 1865-1925 (New York, 1987), 411–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Montgomery, Workers' Control, 91-112; and Larry Peterson, “The One Big Union in International Perspective: Revolutionary Industrial Unionism, 1900-1925” in Cronin, Work, Community, 59. On the role of the NWLB, see Conner, War Labor Board, 108-25; and Bing, War-time Strikes, 161-64.

24 Élie Halévy, “The Problem of Worker Control” (1981), in The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War, ed. Halévy, Élie (Garden City, N.Y., 1965)Google Scholar; Tawney, R. H., foreword to Goodrich, Carter L., The Frontier of Control: A Study in British Workshop Politics (New York, 1920)Google Scholar.

25 The most recent and thorough treatment of the shop stewards' movement is Hinton, James, The First Shop Stewards' Movement (London, 1973Google Scholar), but see also Pribicevic, Branko, The Shop Stewards' Movement and Workers' Control, 1910-1922 (Oxford, 1959)Google Scholar; and Cole, G. D. H., Workshop Organisation (London, 1923)Google Scholar.

26 For overviews of the deskilling process, see Gordon, Edwards, and Reich, Segmented Work; and Braverman, Harry, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974)Google Scholar, For a comparative view of the dilution issue during the war, see Hardach, First World War, 186.

27 Hinton's First Shop Stewards' Movement places particular emphasis on the dilution issue. In contrast, Alastair Reid argues that the importance of the dilution issue has been “exaggerated” by other historians and that wage issues were more significant in generating labor unrest. See Reid, , “Dilution, Trade Unionism and the State in Britain during the First World War,” in Shop Floor Bargaining and the State: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Tolliday, Steven and Zeitlin, Jonathan (New York, 1985)Google Scholar. McLean, Iain, The legend of Red Clydeside (Edinburgh, 1983)Google Scholar also downplays the importance of dilution. There is little doubt, though, that dilution, because of the highly visible backing it received from the Lloyd George government, and because of the strength of British craft union traditions, was a greater spur to militant labor action in Britain than in America. Lombardi notes that “very little” was done by the government in the United States “in the field of dilution before the war ended.” Labor's Voice, 296.

28 See McLean, Red Clydeside; Reid, “Dilution”; Currie, Industrial Politics, 96-97; Fox, History and Heritage, 288-89.

29 In Britain, as in America, some of the most progressive leaders of the Workers' control movement responded to the pressures for dilution and the rationalization of production techniques by acknowledging the potential benefits of scientific management while at the same time insisting that workers be allowed to play a major role in shaping and controlling the implementation of any changes in shop floor practices. Hinton, First Shop Stewards' Movement, 129-31, 332-36; Carmen Sirianni, “Workers' Control in Europe: A Comparative Sociological Analysis,” in Cronin, Work, Community, 301-2; Nadworny, Milton, Scientific Management and the Unions, 1900-1932: A Historical Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1955)Google Scholar; and Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal.”

30 Montgomery, Workers' Control, 108; Hinton, First Shop Stewards' Movement, 337.

31 James E. Cronin, “Labor Insurgency and Class Formation: Comparative Perspectives on the Crisis of 1917-1920 in Europe,” in Cronin, Work, Community, 35. See also Peterson, “One Big Union”; Sirianni, “Workers' Control”; Goodrich, Frontier of Control, 264-65; and Cole, Workshop Organisation, 93-94, for similar views stressing the importance of the all grades form of labor organization introduced by the shop Stewards' movement.

32 Quoted in Hinton, First Shop Stewards' Movement, 129.

33 The quotation is from a pamphlet entitled “Towards Industrial Democracy: A Memorandum on Workers' Control” (1917), reprinted in Industrial Democracy in Great Britain: A Book of Readings and Witnesses for Workers' Control, ed. Coates, Ken and Topham, Anthony (London, 1968), 108–9Google Scholar. See also Pribicevic, Shop Stewards' Movement, 50-53, 150-51; and Hinton, First Shop Stewards' Movement, 279-80.

34 Although it emphasized rank-and-file organization at the shop and plant level, the shop Stewards' movement did produce, in the area of its greatest strength, the Clydeside region, a district-level Workers' Committee to coordinate the grass-roots efforts of the shop organizations. Hinton, First Shop Stewards' Movement, 92-93.

35 The most thorough study of the Whitley committee is found in Charles, Rodger, The Development of Industrial Relations in Britain, 1911-1939: Studies in the Evolution of Collective Bargaining at National and Industry Level (London, 1973), 77–226Google Scholar; but see also Seymour, John Barton, The Whitley Councils Scheme (London, 1932)Google Scholar; Élie Halévy, “The Policy of Social Peace in England: The Whitley Councils” (1919); in Halévy, Era of Tyrannies; and Johnson, Paul Barton, Land Fit for Heroes: The Planning of British Reconstruction, 1916-1919 (Chicago, 1968), 158–70Google Scholar.

36 Johnson, Land Fit for Heroes, 148-60.

37 The Industrial Council Plan in Great Britain (Washington, D.C., 1919), 19–20Google ScholarPubMed. All the Whitley committee reports, along with related contemporary documents, can be found in this publication.

38 Ibid., 35-36.

39 Ibid., 22, 36.

40 Ibid., 7, 32, 28.

41 Ibid., 27-28. For background on the Trade Boards Acts of 1909 and 1918, see Allen, V. L., Trade Unions and the Government (London, 1960), 59–60Google Scholar.

42 107 H.C. Deb., col. 72-73.

43 Ibid., col. 95-96.

44 Industrial Council Plan, 18.

45 Charles, Industrial Relations, 205-7. Several years would subsequently elapse before Parliament seriously considered any legislative proposals for putting into practice the idea of giving the sanction of law to agreements reached by joint industrial councils.

46 Industrial Council Plan; Sparkes, Malcolm, “Britain's Building Trades Parliament,” Nation 110 (24 Jan. 1920): 102–3Google Scholar; Tead, Ordway, “National Organization by Industries,” New Republic 18 (8 Feb. 1919): 48–51Google Scholar; Gleason, Arthur, “New Constitutionalism in British Industry,” Survey 41 (1 Feb. 1919): 594–98Google Scholar; Arthur Gleason, “Whitley Councils,” ibid. 42 (5-19 April 1919): 27-28, 75-77, 109-11; Cole, G. D. H., “Industrial Councils of Great Britain,” Dial 66 (22 Feb. 1919): 171–73Google Scholar; Greenwood, Arthur, “Development of British Industrial Thought,” Atlantic Monthly 124 (July 1919): 106–15Google Scholar.

47 The phrase “positive-sum vision of collective bargaining” is used by Fox to describe the underlying philosophy of the Whitley scheme. Fox, History and Heritage, 295.

48 George Bell, the chairman of the New York conference, is quoted in Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal,” 218. For additional background on the clothing industry, see Fraser, , “New Unionism”; Budish, J. M. and Soule, George, The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry ([1980]; New York, 1968), 149–50Google Scholar; Josephson, Matthew, Sidney Hillman: Statesman of American Labor (Garden City, N.Y., 1952), 196Google Scholar; Soule, George, Sidney Hillman: Labor Statesman (New York, 1939), 40-42, 100–101Google Scholar.

49 Rockefeller, John D. Jr., The Personal Relation in Industry (New York, 1923), 137Google Scholar. For two other contemporary statements by leading advocates of employee representation, see Leitch, John, Man to Man: The Story of Industrial Democracy (New York, 1919)Google Scholar; and Litchfield, Paul W., The Industrial Republic ([1919]; Cleveland, Ohio, 1946)Google Scholar. See also Nelson, Daniel, “The Company Union Movement, 1900-1937: A Reexamination,” Business History Review 56 (Autumn 1982): 335–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Brandes, Stuart D., American Welfare Capitalism, 1880-1940 (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar.

50 Nelson, “Company Union Movement,” 338.

51 Nadworny, Scientific Management, 104-5; Bustard. “The Human Factor,” 180-215.

52 Rowntree's “My Dream of a Factory” contains a full statement of his views on employee representation. This speech appears in Gleason, Arthur, What the Workers Want: A Study of British Labor (New York, 1920), 306–16Google Scholar.

53 Hicks, Clarence J., My Life in Industrial Relations: Fifty years in the Growth of a Profession (New York, 1941), 82–83Google Scholar.

54 For analyses which emphasize the difficulties of translating Whitleyism into reality, see Fox, History and Heritage, 295-99; and Lowe, Adjusting to Democracy, 92-96.

55 Pribicevic, Shop Stewards' Movement, 8.

56 For excerpts from Hodges's plan for nationalization, see Coates, Industrial Democracy, 259-63; and Gleason, What the Workers Want, 173-83.

57 Currie, Industrial Politics, 101-3; see also Armitage, Susan, The Politics of Decontrol of Industry: Britain and the United States (London, 1969), 110–57Google Scholar. Wright, A. W., G. D. H. Cole and Socialist Democracy (Oxford, 1979Google Scholar), presents an insightful discussion of Cole's life and ideas.

58 Armitage, Politics of Decontrol, 110-57; Gleason, What the Workers Want, 422-40.

59 For general background on the Plumb Plan, see Kerr, K. Austin, American Railroad Politics, 1914-1920: Rates, Wages, and Efficiency (Pittsburgh, Pa., 1968)Google Scholar. For a complete presentation and discussion of the plan itself, see Hearings before the House Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Return of the Railroads to Private Ownership, 66th Cong., 1st sess., 1919.

60 House Hearings, Return of Railroads, 602, 680.

61 Hearings before the Senate Committee on Interstate Commerce, Extension of Tenure of Government Control of Railroads, 65th Cong., 3d sess., 1919, 1083.

62 This analysis of the sources of the “economic radiealism of American labor” appears in American Labor Dynamics: In the Light of Post-War Developments, ed. Hardman, J. B. S. ([1928]; New York, 1968), 25Google Scholar.

63 Plumb, Glenn E. and Roylance, William G., Industrial Democracy: A Plan for Its Achievement (New York, 1923), 203Google Scholar; Montgomery, “New Tendencies,” 98-99.

64 Sidney, and Webb, Beatrice, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain ([1920]; Cambridge, England, 1975), 178Google Scholar. See also Kerr, American Railroad Politics, 161-64, for the influence of scientific management doctrines on the Plumb Plan.

65 Anderson himself supported establishing a tripartite system of control within a framework of joint private and public ownership of the railroads, with Workers', stockholders, and the government having equal representation on the railroads' board of directors. House Hearings, Return of Railroads, 1561.

66 McNaughton, Industrial Relations, 47; Mowat, Charles Loch, Britain between the Wars, 1918-1940 (Chicago, 1955), 124Google Scholar.

67 Both Rodney Lowe and Rodger Charles emphasize Lloyd George's cynical use of the conference and his failure to carry out its recommendations. See Lowe, , “The Failure of Consensus in Britain: The National Industrial Conference, 1919-1921,” Historical Journal 21 (1978): 649–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Charles, Industrial Relations, 229-57. Paul Johnson, on the other hand, argues that the conference was not merely a sham and that many of those directly involved in its deliberations, including members of the government, sincerely believed in its promise as a basis for a more harmonious system of labor relations. Land Fit for Heroes, 376-82.

68 Industrial Conference, Report of Provisional Joint Committee Presented to Meeting of Industrial Conference (London, 1920)Google Scholar. It should be noted that the FBI was never fully representative of British employers, and that Allan Smith was instrumental in founding another organization, the National Confederation of Employers' Organisations, which took a more antilabor position than the FBI. Charles, Industrial Relations, 246-52; Middlemas, Politics of Industrial Society, 146-47.

69 U.S. Department of Labor, Proceedings of the First Industrial Conference (Washington, D.C, 1920)Google ScholarPubMed. For background, see also Hurwitz, Haggai, “Ideology and Industrial Conflict: President Wilson's First Industrial Conference of October 1919,” Labor History 18 (Fall 1977): 509–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Best, Gary Dean, “President Wilson's Second Industrial Conference,” Labor History 16 (Fall 1975): 503–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Larry G. Gerber, “The American and Canadian National Industrial Conferences of 1919: A Comparative Analysis” (forthcoming in Labor History).

70 Labor Dept., First Industrial Conference, 141.

71 Ibid., 144.

72 Ibid., 59. See also Hurwitz, “Ideology and Industrial, Conflict,” 514-18; and Gerber, “American and Canadian Conferences.”

73 Labor Dept., First Industrial Conference, 81-82, 240-44. In criticizing the employers' proposals, Samuel Gompers actually made specific reference to what he viewed as “the mistake” that was made in England with regard to the wartime development of “the shop steward method of organization.” Ibid., 233. Of course, even in Britain, much of the established trade union leadership was also hostile to the shop Stewards' movement.

74 Report of Industrial Conference Called by the President (N.p., 1920), 9-12. See also Best, “Second Industrial Conference.”

75 Kerr, American Railroad Politics, 204-27.

76 Commerce Dept., Historical Statistics, 98.

77 Membership in British trade unions went down by 42 percent between 1920 and 1930. Branson, Britain in the Twenties, 162.

78 The present article grows out of research I am currently doing on a book which will examine the evolution of corporatist notions of industrial democracy and self-government in industry in America and Britain from 1914 to 1939. However, this project is far from completion, so that any observations about the period after 1919 appearing here must be considered tentative.

79 Hawley, Ellis W., “Secretary Hoover and the Bituminous Coal Problem, 1921-1928,” Business History Review 42 (Autumn 1968): 247CrossRefGoogle Scholar. McQuaid, “Corporate Liberalism”; Alchon, Invisible Hand of Planning; Wilson, Joan Hoff, Herbert Hoover: Forgotten Progressive (Boston, 1975)Google Scholar; and the essays in Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era Thought and Practice, ed. Hawley, Ellis W. (Iowa City, Ia., 1981)Google Scholar also emphasize the development of associational and corporatist ideas in the 1920s, as does Hawley in such other works as “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921-1928,” Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 116–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; “Discovery of Corporate Liberalism”; and Great War.

80 Howell Harris, “The Snares of Liberalism? Politicians, Bureaucrats, and the Shaping of Federal Labour Relations Policy in the United States, Ca. 1915-1947,” in Tolliday and Zeitlin, Shop Floor Bargaining, 161, places particular emphasis on the growth of the profession of industrial relations during the twenties.

81 Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal,” 223; on the B & O Plan, see Derber, Industrial Democracy, 238-41; and Nadworny, Scientific Management, 122-26.

82 For background on the Railway Labor Act, see Zieger, Robert H., “From Hostility to Moderation: Railroad Labor Policy in the 1920s,” Labor History 9 (Winter 1968): 23–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and my own discussion of Donald Richberg's role in the drafting of the law in Gerber, Larry G., The Limits of Liberalism: Josephus Daniels, Henry Stimson, Bernard Baruch, Donald Richberg, Felix Frankfurter and the Development of the Modern American Political Economy (New York, 1983), 198–205Google Scholar.

83 For a thorough discussion of the Portland manifesto, see Walling, William English, American Labor and American Democracy (New York, 1926), 90–97Google Scholar.

84 Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society.

85 This phrase is used by Fox, History and Heritage, 343; but see also Burgess, Challenge of Labour, 235-41.

86 For contrasting views of the relative appeal at this time of pluralist and corporatist ideas in both the United States and Britain, see Derber, Industrial Democracy; Charles, Industrial Relations; and Currie, Industrial Politics.

87 Goodrich, Frontier of Control, 7.

88 H. M. Gitelman notes in his study of the businessmen who formed the National Industrial Conference Board in 1916 that these influential employers were really of “two minds” in their view of the need to accept some form of organized labor. Gitelman contends that their public statements in favor of labor's right to organize were not actually hypocritical, in spite of their frequent anti-union actions, because they had simply not yet fully come to grips in their own minds with the problems created by modern collectivism. “Being of Two Minds: American Employers Confront the Labor Problem, 1915-1919,” Labor History 25 (Spring 1984): 189–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 For discussions emphasizing the development of the “broker state” as an integral part of a pluralist system, see Braeman, John, “The New Deal and the ‘Broker State’: A Review of the Recent Scholarly Literature,” Business History Review 46 (Winter 1972): 409–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Lowi, End of Liberalism.

90 Brody, David, “The Rise and Decline of Welfare Capitalism,” in his Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the Twentieth Century Struggle (New York, 1980), 60–78Google Scholar.