Abstract
Ronald Schatz has given us a fascinating and unusual book: a collective biography that traces the emergence and impact of a generation of labor relations professionals who left their stamp not only on the field in which they were trained but also on higher education, urban politics, foreign policy, sports, and much more. Schatz shows how people who were trained to negotiate, mediate, and monitor labor conflicts through their service with the National War Labor Board (NWLB) during World War II were among the most influential figures in shaping postwar America.
Drawing on decades of research, including interviews with many of his subjects, Schatz traces the rise and influence of a talented group that included, among others, Gerald Ford’s secretary of labor, John Dunlop; the master arbitrators/mediators, George Taylor and Ted Kheel; influential leaders of higher education, Clark Kerr and Robben Fleming; the transformative baseball union leader, Marvin Miller; and industrial relations academics Jean McKelvey and Benjamin Aaron. By extension, Schatz includes George Shultz, who served as Richard Nixon’s secretary of labor and Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and was a protégé of the labor board crew.
Many in this group were children of small-scale businessmen and farmers and had roots in middle-class, small-town America. Some were influenced by the Social Gospel, others steeped in the institutional economics of John R. Commons. In politics, they were “basically New Deal liberals, although not unqualifiedly so” (p. 17). But it was NWLB service that most connected them.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt set up the board in 1942, he prevailed on George Taylor, then a 40-year-old economist steeped in the Commons tradition who had already established a reputation as a skilled mediator, to serve as its vice chair under William H. Davis. The rest of the “labor board crew,” with the exception of Shultz, worked for the NWLB in Washington or its regional offices. Their experience settling wartime disputes was formative. In approaching that work they shared a strong belief summarized by Taylor: “Collective bargaining and organized labor are among the great resources possessed by America” (p. 39).
In reviewing their tenure with the NWLB, Schatz contests the views of the board advanced by Nelson Lichtenstein, Staughton Lynd, Katherine V. Stone, and Martin Glaberman in the 1970s and 1980s, which characterized the board as primarily significant for the role it played in subverting labor militancy and fostering bureaucratic unionism. Schatz finds those views “not persuasive” (p. 29). Instead, he argues that the board’s most significant accomplishment was mainstreaming a process that American business had furiously resisted to that point: collective bargaining. In their largely successful crusade to “make collective bargaining work,” as Taylor put it, the board accomplished a truly heroic task (p. 56).
In the postwar years, Schatz shows, NWLB veterans continued to make collective bargaining work. Among the stories Schatz tells to illustrate their influence is how figures like Taylor, John Dunlop, and Sylvester Garrett helped create stable labor–management relationships during the 1950s when labor conflict seethed below the surface of a supposed “consensus.” His account of Garrett’s role in relation to the mammoth 1959 steel strike sheds new light on the aftereffects of that conflict and why it was the last great steel strike of the postwar era.
Even as NWLB veterans guided collective bargaining in postwar basic industry, Schatz explains, they helped extend it into the public sector and sports. Ted Kheel drew upon his wartime experience to become the most trusted mediator of public-sector labor disputes in New York City, the nation’s epicenter of public employee organizing, while George Taylor crafted the 1967 law that would set the parameters for collective bargaining in New York State. Meanwhile, Marvin Miller, who had served as an NWLB hearing officer in Philadelphia and then a researcher and ultimately chief economist with the Steelworkers in the 1950s and 1960s, was hired to lead the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1966. By the time he left that organization in 1982, he had not only turned it into an effective collective bargaining union but led a successful campaign for free agency, ridding baseball of the “reserve clause” that had kept players under the owners’ thumbs. Miller’s work soon transformed all of professional sport.
Schatz also shows how the NWLB vets’ influence spread beyond US borders and outside the precincts of labor–management relations. Their international influence reached a peak at the height of the Cold War when Dunlop, Clark Kerr, Charles Myers, and Frederick Harbison published Industrialism and Industrial Man: Problems of Labor and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), a book that surveyed labor relations systems around the world and optimistically predicted an imminent future when “class warfare will be forgotten and in its place will be bureaucratic contest of interest group against interest group. The battles will be in the corridors instead of the streets, and memos will flow instead of blood” (p. 95).
Yet their tenure as oracles was brief. No sooner had the vets sketched out a vision of a stable postwar order than that vision began to crumble around them. Those who had moved into leadership in higher education—Clark Kerr at University of California, Robben Fleming at Wisconsin, and Dunlop at Harvard—were the first to experience the crumbling as they faced anti-war students who rejected their liberal mediators’ mindset. The fragmentation accelerated when an increasingly anti-union business community and a rightward-shifting Republican party subverted the influence Dunlop had cultivated with the Nixon and Ford administrations, forcing him to resign from the latter administration in 1976.
Thereafter, the NWLB veterans were increasingly marginalized. Their greatest post-1960s success came vicariously through their mentee, George Shultz. Schatz rightly credits Shultz for two important achievements: advancing affirmative action during his stint as Nixon’s secretary of labor and helping bring the Cold War to a nonviolent end as Reagan’s secretary of state during crucial negotiations with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Tragically, though, most of the labor board crew witnessed the unraveling of the system they had ridden into prominence. Dunlop, who had become their de facto leader, was called upon to try to save that foundering system as chair of the Clinton-era “Dunlop Commission.” But, as Schatz shows, he soon discovered it was no longer possible to forge a grand labor–management bargain. Corporations did not need a master mediator to deal with a declining labor movement; the dissolution that Dunlop sought to prevent was just fine with them.
Schatz concludes that without “the extraordinary abilities and grit of mediators and arbitrators,” the “union-management relations might have broken down much sooner than they did” (p. 254). While true, this does not exonerate the labor board crew for their complicity in the eventual breakdown. Like so many of the union leaders they dealt with, they were too focused on servicing their constituents to anticipate let alone avert the collapse of the system that guaranteed their status. In the end, Schatz says, not only had the “world overwhelmed the reformers,” they “did not [leave] successors” (p. 254). It’s up to us now to comb the ruins of their legacy for hints as to how to create in this century structures more broadly liberating, democratic, and durable than those the labor board crew helped build in their time. We are better prepared for that urgent task thanks to Schatz’s obvious labor of love.