Rethinking Industrial Relations,or at least the British radical frame

The empirical side of RIR

Kelly deserves praise for going out on an academic limb and staking the credibility of his theoretical framework on a predicted outcome that conventional wisdom of the time had largely written off (but see Clawson, 2003). Union decline had already been in progress for two decades but he tells readers a resurgence is likely soon.

Twenty years later no resurgence has occurred in the British labor movement or, indeed, in any nation’s labor movement in the relatively advanced nations of the northern hemisphere. In fact, the trend in most countries has been in the opposite direction with gradual but cumulatively significant decline in union density, private sector union membership, and broad measures of strike activity.

Kelly notes, however, that long waves are not a mechanistic phenomenon so the length of each wave varies as does the timing of the peaks and troughs. Thus, the theory’s ‘threshold of resurgence’ prediction in 1998 is best interpreted as a three-part probability statement: a long wave turning point is going to occur in the relatively near future with close to 100% certainty, its mean expected timing is 50–60 years from the preceding turning point, but the average onset time is subject to significant-sized variance with a standard deviation of perhaps 5 or 10 years. Earlier I used this information, combined with Kelly’s statement that the last major Kondratiev peak was 1968–1974, to calculate that the next cycle trough should be in the interval 1993–2004 (1968 + 25 = 1993; 1974 + 30 = 2004) with the next peak in 2018–2034.

The march of history, therefore, has only been able to generate one additional data point – the predicted trough of 1993–2004 – as new evidence for and against Kelly’s hypothesis. Although no crisis appeared in this time interval, several years later Kondratiev’s theory seems vindicated when to the surprise of most economists in 2007 the financial sector of the advanced capitalist economies began to implode and a year later the World Financial Crisis threatened to turn into a 1930s-style depression. A decade later, we are only now entering the first year of the 2018–2034 window for the next Kondratiev cycle peak and, as Kelly argues, the economic breakdowns tend to be substantially more severe at the peaks than troughs. Thus, from this perspective, long wave theory passed its first test with the next larger-stakes test still in the future.

Kelly’s scholarly fame as a forecaster rests, however, not on the validity of long wave theory per se but on the hypothesis that IR outcomes, such as union growth/decline, strike activity, and working-class militancy, exhibit similar-timed waves. Here the record is not so encouraging. Shown in Figure 2 is a chart of strike activity (days lost) and union membership in Britain from 1931 to 2014. Union membership is almost entirely dominated by trend growth with membership steadily rising from 1931 to 1979 and then steadily falling through 2014. Strike activity shows much more year-to-year volatility. If the time line is taken back to the First World War, the chart would show a very large surge in strike activity from 1919 across the middle of the 1920s with a notable spike for the 1926 General Strike. The next sustained surge in strike activity is from 1969 to 1985, the ending point of the national miners’ strike. After the union’s defeat, strike activity dropped sharply, registered a near-historic low in 1991, and from that year on modestly fluctuated around a low-level horizontal trend line.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

UK strike activity and union membership (in millions).

The only recognizable sign of a long wave is the respective strike surges of 1919–1926 and 1969–1985, timed roughly 50–60 years apart. By construction, the twin strike peaks create corresponding low areas on both sides but the low areas in Figure 2 do not resemble U-shaped valleys with a visible bottom points but, rather, two long plateaus of relatively flat strike activity (called the ‘normal’ level of strike activity in Kaufman, 1981) with a step-function drop in the post-1985 plateau (an intercept shift in the normal level). From the vantage point of 1998, Kelly predicted an imminent resurgence in strike activity because the Kondratiev cycle was due to have a bottom turning point between 1993 and 2004. Even if the interval is extended to 2010 to incorporate the World Financial Crisis, no recognizable upward bump is evident, let alone resurgence.

The beginning of this article leads off with two epigraphs. The first is from RIR: ‘The test of the framework is whether it can help us understand the varied forms of mobilization and counter-mobilization through time’ (Kelly, 1998: 107). I may be outvoted by my peers in the academic jury box but, based on the evidence in Figure 2, I have to give a thumb’s down to the theory’s first shot at ex-ante prediction.

To be fair, Kelly’s evaluative standard in the first epigraph is framed in terms of understand rather than predict and applies not just to strikes or union density but varied forms of labor mobilization. Thus, even though the model incorrectly predicted a union mobilization wave in 2000–2010, one could argue it still passes the ‘understand’ test by providing a framework of major variables and processes that explain mobilization dynamics writ large. I am sympathetic to this argument but, after reading the second epigraph about the 30-year decline in strike activity – and also not seeing a cross-country increase in other forms of labor-related mobilization – I have to conclude that even by this broader standard RIR fails the test. Indeed, the epigraph seems to support the postmodernist argument.

Another weak point in long wave theory, whether from Marx or Kondratiev, is the prediction that cycles of worker mobilization and conflict show substantial synchronicity across countries. On one hand, the hypothesis seems supported because labor union density and strikes show the same downward, quiescent trend across most of the advanced industrial countries (Gall, 2012; Vandaele, 2016) but, on the other, this common trend is cold comfort for Kelly and fellow Marxists/radicals because it reinforces support for the postmodernist ‘unions are industrial dinosaurs’ story. Also a problem, labor unrest and strike activity are on the upswing in some Asian and southern hemisphere nations (e.g., China, Vietnam, Brazil) and RIR and mobilization theory need to be able to give a consistent explanation for this divergent behavior.

The theory side of RIR

The theoretical corpus of RIR is an integration of Tilly’s micro-level of theory of enterprise-level worker mobilization and a Marxian superstructure of capitalist social relations and long wave cycles. Brief evaluation of each is provided below. First, however, note needs to be given to a more general problem of analysis that extends across the entire book and to which this article’s title draws attention.

Kelly presents RIR as a general work of industrial relations theory but the further one gets from the institutions, cultural traditions, and IR literature of Britain the less general it seems. For example, the research literature Kelly draws on is, in numbers and substance, largely British while authors and works from outside Britain are secondary (US) or mostly absent (rest of world). Tilly is a notable American exception but otherwise Kelly does not seem much interested in substantive contact with US work, other than to provide examples of the field’s embrace of postmodernist theories of union decline and labor–management cooperation. He thus fails to cite and build on important studies relevant to RIR, such as Wheeler’s (1980) integrative IR theory of worker mobilization and strike action and radical-Marxist theories that link economic cycles to changes in the relations of production inside firms, such as labor discipline, extraction of labor power, and rate of exploitation (e.g., Weisskopf et al., 1983). Similarly, in the 1990s British IR started to take more interest in the rest of Europe (e.g., 1995 founding of European Journal of Industrial Relations) but little of this opening is evident in RIR. Swedish readers, for example, may read RIR and wonder about the generality and usefulness of a theory anchored on oppositional class mobilization and militant unionism when there are alternative, more peaceful roads to socialism, such as the Rehn-Meidner model of economic democracy (Erixon, 2010; discussed by Kelly in Trade Unions and Socialist Politics in 1988 but considered not relevant to the British situation).

Sweden and other countries come into RIR mostly through the cross-country statistical analysis of strikes and union density (e.g., pp. 92–95) but otherwise RIR has a strong inward focus on the British experience. Thus, RIR is framed as a general theory of union/working-class mobilization but the emphasis is on theorizing events in Britain which then, in Marxist ‘theory serves praxis’ tradition, can be utilized as a tool to promote greater unionism in British industry, socialism in politics, and radical-Marxist alignment in academic industrial relations (Kelly, 1988: Ch. 11). For these reasons, the dominating story line in RIR is the rise (1960s–1979s), fall (post-1979), and predicted rise again of British worker insurgency and union strength; the (metaphorical) ghosts hovering through the pages are the leaders of the two opposing classes, prime minister Thatcher and mineworkers’ president Scargill; and the culminating event is labor’s defeat in the 1984 nationwide miners’ strike. Thus, RIR begins on p. 1 by describing the decline of the miners’ union from 700,000 members in 1954 to 10,000 in 1994; next sets up the foil for the rest of the book by citing the ‘postmodernist claims that the classical labour movement is in terminal decline’; and then gives the mission statement, ‘The principal aim of this book is to show that these fashionable and beguiling notions are seriously flawed and deeply misleading.’

The book’s British-centric focus would be only an expositional blemish if the long wave/mobilization model in the book had general applicability and explanatory power across countries, IR systems, and historical time. Even for Britain, it has so far failed the test for historical time, although for reasons indicated a final verdict cannot yet be rendered. It also seems doubtful that the model, even when contextualized to fit each IR system’s unique historical/institutional/social situation, has predictive generality (e.g., in statistical terms, one or more consistently signed and statistically significant hypothesized main effects). My assessment is that RIR’s mobilization model, as summarized in the MM equation (above), insightfully delineates and describes the worker mobilization process. However, with 10 variables in the casual sequence and a host of second-order contingency, mediator, interaction, and contextual variables, it is too much to expect that robust predicted outcomes emerge at the end (Hyman, 2004). I can definitely see where RIR and the MM model help explain in a loose but causal sense the process driving the rise and fall of worker/union mobilization in Britain over the 1960s–1990s, and that each of the 10 steps in MM (e.g., collective identity, causal attribution) have their own testable main effects across countries. It is less easy to see, however, that the model is also helpful in providing causal explanation for the follow-on 30-year decline in mobilization in Britain, and even less easy to see that it has a consistent, robust, and synchronized main effect that helps explain the diverse mobilization patterns across nations. Labor mobilization, for example, is falling in the US, rising in China, and stable in Denmark. Pieces of the MM model can be mixed and matched to explain parts of the three patterns but the causal sequence in MM is too long and the three national contexts are too diverse for the full model to provide a consistent explanation.

Marxist political economy

Kelly wrote Rethinking Industrial Relations as a synthetic combination of Marxian political economy, Kondratiev long wave theory, and social mobilization theory. However, it is readily seen in the literature of the last 20 years, and the contributions to this special issue, that writers who cite RIR are predominantly interested in the social mobilization part, such as for research on union revitalization and social movements and to large extent they put to the side the parts from Marx and Kondratiev. For their particular research purposes this separation may be fine, but for RIR the social mobilization part is only the mediating link in a longer MM chain of causation that starts with Marx – the inherent exploitation and domination of labor under capitalism– and ends with Marx – proletarian insurgency and working-class overthrow of capitalism and transition to socialism.

Kelly’s earlier book, Trade Unions and Socialist Politics (1988), provides a detailed review of Marxian political economy, the different sub-schools associated with Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, and Bernstein, and their theories regarding unions, strikes, political action, working-class consciousness, and other staples. Kelly for obvious reasons cannot repeat much of this material in RIR but, to this reviewer, errs on the opposite side by including a bevy of Marxist terms and concepts but without giving them definition or explanation. This omission is then worsened by what can be perceived as a ‘do as I say but not as I do’ double standard on his part. Kelly directs a number of strongly worded criticisms at opponents and one is that writers in the pluralist, institutionalist, labor process, and HRM camps leave key concepts, such as power, interests, and collectivism, undefined, hazily sketched, or under-conceptualized (pp. 15, 33). This criticism has merit, although it is over-generalized from the British case, but then Kelly does the same.

In RIR important concepts, such as exploitation, oppression, class (and working class, ruling class, class struggle, class consciousness), interests, injustice, power, and collectivism, are neither formally defined nor analytically conceptualized. Thus, the fundamental proposition that drives the book, and on which a good part of its propositions and conclusions depend, is ‘It is this inevitable exploitation and domination of labour by capital that creates the conflict of interest between the social classes’ (p. 25). This proposition is axiomatic to Marxists but, to most everyone else, it is neither logically obvious nor empirically evident that employees in significant number perceive they are part of a wage-labor working class, in a conflict situation with their employer, or exploited and oppressed by that employer.

Kelly may respond by pointing to the sentence in RIR above the quotation (p. 25) where he explains that exploitation arises from the need of employers to capture surplus value to provide profit and pay rent, interest, and dividends. However, this defense only moves the problem back one step to the definition of surplus value. As I understand it (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2010), the Marxist position is that profit is inherently a form of institutionalized theft from the non-propertied ‘wage slaves’ in much the same manner that centuries ago feudal lords and plantation owners expropriated surplus value from their serfs and chattel slaves. (Surplus value = the difference between the worker’s hourly wage or in-kind goods received and value of output produced and sold.) Capitalism and mainstream economics blinds the wage slaves to their exploitation with the rhetoric of free labor and theory of competitive markets but, in a substantive sense, this freedom is a hollow mockery. That is, the free worker has liberty to quit and starve or go to the next exploitative/oppressive employer (‘islands of the living dead,’ per Ritzer, 2003). Also, in serfdom and slavery the lords of the fief and plantation bear the cost of providing their workers with food, shelter, and care while in capitalism the lords of the factory are relieved of this overhead cost by the employment/master–servant contract and can let workers fend for themselves in a boom-bust, cut-throat labor market. The market wage, therefore, is left by demand/supply – with a reserve army of the unemployed in the background – at near the subsistence level for the bottom strata of the workforce which, in turn, allows capitalists to exploit labor and realize surplus value.

A variation on this theme led the Webbs, and other founders of the Fabian Society and British Labour Party (ideas not covered in TUSP or RIR), to first advocate socialization of hereditary rural estates to capture the gentry’s unearned income from scarcity rents and then socialization of industry to capture the capitalists’ unearned income from monopoly profits (Harrison, 2000; Kaufman, 2013a). The rent theory that justified land nationalization originates with Ricardo in the 1810s but was a half-century later elucidated and popularized by John Stuart Mill and Henry George. The idea is that nature endowed Britain (or Sweden, etc.) with a fixed amount of land and, with economic growth, the demand for land increases and generates rising scarcity rents and income for the landlord class. The Fabians’ argument is that this income is mostly unearned because it is a payment to a piece of paper (a hereditary property right), rather than for the landlords’ productive economic contribution, and thus is rightfully expropriated by the state for public investment (e.g., a national health service). Marx read Ricardo, generalized the rent idea from land to capital, portrayed profit as an unearned surplus value arising from individual ownership of monopolized industry, and argued that profit, like land rent, should be transferred to society through collective ownership of the means of production (Fine and Saad-Filho, 2010). Nature creates the scarcity of land while society creates the monopoly of capital through restricted class ownership.

The Webbs are widely regarded as founders of the British IR field (Harrison, 2000), were advocates of a socialist economy, and regarded rent theory as a logically superior version of Marx’s surplus value. In Marx’s formulation, the employer exploits surplus value from every wage worker and labor exploitation is thus a generic condition of capitalism and present in every employment relationship. The Webbs thought Marx’s deduction rests on fallacious logic (the labor theory of value) and concluded from rent theory that labor exploitation occurs only in the subset of employment situations where natural or contrived restrictions allow employers to capture rent from workers by paying below the market rate. Kelly could have brought in the Webbs and fellow Fabians, kept Marx but avoided some of his more problematic aspects, and creatively framed Rethinking Industrial Relations as a return to the (British) field’s radical/socialist roots.

Kelly chose, however, to sink or swim with Marx. The upside is that Marx’s surplus value concept means exploitation is omnipresent in every workplace: workers individually and as a class experience grievance and injustice, and injustice sets in motion the mobilization process. The downside is that most people conclude that Marx’s indictment of capitalism and employers is too extreme and one-sided (Ackers and Reid, 2016) and his theories of surplus value and exploitation are defective (Roemer, 1982). For example, is it really the case that modern-day flight attendants, teachers, construction workers, and restaurant servers, not to mention professors, doctors, engineers, and other high-skilled proletarians, feel they are exploited by their employers? Marxists may argue that these workers would recognize their exploitation once educated by radical activists to understand their real class interests (e.g., RIR, p. 6) but, I suspect, most of these people will judge they know their interests much better than left-wing intellectuals (per Flanders, 1970; Perlman, 1928). Likewise, is it really the case that profits, say as reported by British Airways, Tesco, and the local fish and chips shop, are an unearned surplus skimmed from the workers’ wages? Or, alternatively, are these profits to substantial degree legitimate and socially useful payments to, first, the enterprising entrepreneurs who create and often run these businesses (and provide jobs that otherwise would not exist) and, second, to the companies and their owners for the billions of pounds invested in the planes, buildings, and equipment, and willingness to shoulder the risk of capital loss?

Thus, if the experience, respectively, of East and West Germany, North and South Korea, China before and after Maoist communism, and India before and after Nehru and Fabian socialism (Kaufman, 2014) has a common message, it is that the workers’ real interests are advanced by the rise in living standards and improved work life quality made possible by the energizing effect of private property, markets, entrepreneurship, profits, individual choice and responsibility, and capitalist employment relationships – with the appropriate protection and balance that pluralist/institutionalist industrial relations has long helped design and implement.

The liabilities Kelly takes on with Marx’s theory of exploitation apply with equal force to Marx’s theory of class (Becker, 1989; Das, 2017). Use of the term ‘class,’ and derivatives such as working class and class conflict, starts in the first paragraph (p. 1) of RIR and ends in the book’s last paragraph (p. 132) but is never defined or conceptualized. Kelly tells readers, for example, that union decline in the UK and USA is ‘properly described as class war’ (p. 122), social partnership agreements between unions and employers are ‘class collaboration’ (p. 103), and class struggle is a ‘perennial feature of capitalist society’ (p. 108). Whatever merits Marxian class analysis might have had for understanding nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, it seems notably ill-suited and out of date for modern twenty-first-century societies where once-clear class lines separating capitalist and wage worker have splintered and blurred into a diversity of social identities and affiliations defined by more finely-grained and overlapping markers, such as occupation, education, gender/race, income, and rural/urban. Thus, while doctors, teachers, electricians, and fast-food workers still go out on strike in the late 2010s and protest in front of Parliament, it seems questionable even at RIR’s high level of theorizing to describe them as part of a working class or engaged in class conflict.

Finally, the concept of interests figures in two of the four central problems Kelly identifies as at the heart of industrial relations but it is left undefined and given an overly-narrow Marxist interpretation. Kelly asserts the fundamental Marxian premise that the relation between employer and employee is one of fundamental antagonism and conflict of interest. Since conflict of interests is embedded in every relationship between two or more people, the remarkable thing would be if the employment relation did not have it. However, interest conflicts do not necessarily imply antagonism, struggle, exploitation, injustice, or similar debilitating or delegitimizing features. For example, husbands and wives, shoppers and grocers, and professors and students have conflicting interests but their relationships make both parties better off – or, if they don’t, one or both parties exit the relationship and search for a better one, albeit constrained by sometimes substantial mobility costs. The husbands and wives who stay married, and the managers and employees who keep working together, are sometimes miserable, sometimes very happy, and often times in a so-so middle range. Plotting these relational outcomes yields a frequency distribution, perhaps resembling a bell-shaped curve. For the employment relation, the ‘dark satanic mill’ & ‘boss from hell’ marks the bottom endpoint of the distribution and the ‘great place to work’ & ‘boss from heaven’ mark the top endpoint (Heery, 2016).

Employment relationships, like marital relationships, have long been legally and socially structured so one party has more power than the other (patriarchy in marriage, laws allowing husbands to sell wives). Similarly, both employment and marital relations can be the scene of antagonism, injustice, and oppression with few escape options. But, just as HRM writers tend to paint a too rosy picture with attention mostly on the top of the distribution (e.g., ‘100 Best Companies to Work For’), radical-Marxist writers err in the opposite direction and paint a too-negative picture with workplaces either at the low-end (‘100 Worst Companies to Work For’), headed in that direction with the next crisis, or artfully disguised with unitarist rhetoric. RIR clearly fits in the latter category and, for this reason, seems unbalanced, partisan, and negative.

It may be more apparent 20 years after RIR’s publication but Kelly’s focus on long waves has the perhaps paradoxical effect of diverting attention from the market globalization process which over the last three decades has had a devastating impact on wages and employment of blue-collar industrial workers in Western economies. Marx astutely recognized that the ‘good employer’ is continually threatened by competitive undercutting from low-road rivals, leading to a type of Gresham’s law of labor markets where ‘bad employers drive out good.’ In various ways, to stay in business the good employer has to get ‘more for less’ from employees, such as higher productivity from work intensification and longer hours or cost reduction from layoffs and wage/benefit cuts. These actions break the mutual-gain covenant that is key to successful unitarism (Bélanger and Edwards, 2013; Thompson, 2003), activates or ‘lights-up’ the workers’ injustice box in Figure 1, erodes trust and heightens antagonism, starts an upswing in union growth and labor militancy, and as employment relations deteriorate at first individual firms move leftward on a given distribution and then as the deterioration broadens and deepens the entire frequency distribution shifts leftward. Decayed industrial communities, disappearance of good blue-collar industrial jobs, and stagnant wages are the current-day markers of this process in action, although they arise not from a cyclical long wave but the secular process of competitive undercutting from Asia, aided and abetted by financialization.

Mobilization theory

Next considered is mobilization theory. For clarity’s sake, one must first note that three different versions of mobilization theory inhabit the same book. Kelly sometimes refers to mobilization theory as the macro–micro combination of Kondratiev’s long wave theory integrated with Tilly’s mobilization theory (see the Conclusion chapter). In other places, he uses mobilization theory in the more restricted sense of the Tilly model in Chapter 3 (per Figure 1). The alert reader of RIR may wonder, however, why Kelly (and Tilly) refer to Figure 1 as a model of mobilization when, actually, it is a model of collective action (bottom box) and mobilization is only one component, per its position in the middle of Figure 1. A careful reading of Tilly’s book reveals that, even though he labels Figure 1 as a mobilization model, in the text he splits it into two parts: a first-half mobilization process internal to organizations and a second-half polity process external to organizations (after the mobilization box). Thus, what Kelly refers to as mobilization theory in Chapter 3 is, in Tilly’s account, only the top half of Figure 1. To further muddy the water, Kelly (p. 24) states that Tilly’s model ‘begins from a set of Marxist principles’ but it is actually a composite Tilly synthesizes from Durkheim, Marx, Mill, and Weber (1978: 49), albeit with emphasis on Marx.

Also, Tilly is careful to call Figure 1 a model (Figure 1 caption) but Kelly upgrades it to a theory (p. 24, footnote 1). A model is a scaled-down abstracted representation of the features, parts, and connections of an object or process while a theory goes further and fills in the model with a set of assumptions, concepts, and logical cause–effect connections which yield ceteris paribus hypotheses and predictions. Opinions will differ but to this reviewer, Tilly seems on safer ground.

Thinking the mobilization model may be too large and complex for application, I searched the literature of industrial relations for evidence on how RIR is utilized. The majority of studies give a citation at one or two places in the text, perhaps with short mention. A small number take key ideas or components from the model. However, none that I have found depicts or uses the full mobilization model, including articles on collective action and strikes by Kelly (e.g., Kelly, 2015). Instead, what stands out are a number of tributes that RIR influentially introduced into the (mostly British) IR field a new research stream on mobilization and social movements that helped IR researchers better understand causes of union decline and formulate strategies for union revitalization (e.g., Gahan and Pekarek, 2013). Central to the union revitalization strategy is forming coalitions between the traditional labor movement and other social movements pushing progressive agendas, such as women’s rights, anti-globalism, environmentalism, gay/lesbian rights, and living wages (Gall, 2009). By pooling resources and forming a united front for progressive social change the union movement is then better positioned to recruit new members, extend its range of influence, and modernize its image and broaden its social purpose.

An interesting issue raised by RIR is the relationship between these new social movements and the traditional labor movement and, in particular, whether they are collective action complements or substitutes. If substitutes, growth in one results in decline in the other; if complements, growth in one contributes to growth in the other. The postmodernist argument can be interpreted as claiming they are substitutes, reflecting the diminishing social importance of the working class, working-class interests, and working-class trade unions and the rising importance of other social movement groups, interest agendas, and mobilizing organizations.

Kelly disputes this interpretation and argues it is, in essence, a short-run illusion. He summarizes the postmodernist position (p. 121) as: ‘these “new” identities and movements somehow compete with and weaken class identity and class movements, and that as a result the latter are now more “fragmented”.’ As counter-evidence, he cites the gay/lesbian groups ‘which have joined unions and sought to create gay and lesbian sections within them’ and for them ‘the politics of sexuality enriches rather than divides the trade union movement and their class identity’ (p. 122). Kelly then concludes, ‘There is no sign here of any fragmentation of identity but fusion of identities – as consumer, worker and lesbian – focused on the class struggle.’ Thus, in Kelly’s account the class struggle between capital and labor is the central dynamic in capitalist society, the labor movement cyclically waxes and wanes, but in the long run unions are the destined leader of the working class in its struggle against capital. Accordingly, in this vision new-type social movements may at first look separate from and rivalrous with the trade union movement but, over time, their members begin to realize that underneath the diversity of their grievances is a common denominator of capitalist/state exploitation and subordination. A collective class struggle consciousness develops which cements all the movements into a united front with the labor movement in the vanguard position led by committed radical-Marxist-Leninist activists. Thus, the development and spread of alternative social movements misleads postmodern theorists into thinking their growth is at the expense of the trade union movement but, in reaction to intensifying capitalist breakdown, at some future point these groups fuse with the labor movement as junior partners in protest.

Not surprisingly, Kelly’s Marxist perspective imparts to mobilization theory a one-sided application and interpretation, per his focus on workplace conflict of interests, injustice toward workers, and their adversarial collective action response. For example, Martin (1999: 1211) notes the pivotal role played by injustice and observes that without it ‘the conceptual apparatus is irrelevant.’ A yes/no focus on injustice, however, is too narrow by half. Injustice, and correlatives of grievance, exploitation, and subordination, all go on the negative side of the ledger but employment relationships also have a positive side, such as cooperation, consent, mutual gain, and love of job and company. A case study of company love, for example, is on display at the headquarters of Delta Air Lines where sitting in a large hangar is a Boeing 757 jet, named the Spirit of Delta, which appreciative employees purchased with their money and presented to the company (Kaufman, 2013b). Of course, there are also many examples of company hate, such as when strikers burn down the factory. The point being made, however, is that a balanced approach to employment relations does not focus only on workplaces at the bottom end of the frequency distribution full of injustice and hate, or only on workplaces at the top end full of justice and love, but at workplaces across the spectrum, with the middle anchored in utilitarian wage-effort bargaining and the need to keep a job and bring home a paycheck.

The duality between injustice/justice implies a similar duality in employee mobilization. Injustice and hate mobilize workers to struggle against their employers but justice and love mobilize them to struggle for their employers. Tilly’s mobilization model in Figure 1 is neutral in this regard since the causal sequence from Interests to Collective Action can equally generate anti-employer and pro-employer worker mobilization. Indeed, business schools, consultants, and hundreds of management books counsel employers how to make more profit, extract more labor power, and stay union-free by following the steps in Kelly’s model but in the opposite direction (Boxall and Purcell, 2016; Paauwe et al., 2013). If companies can successfully mobilize employees to build a more competitive and profitable business, and do so with positive management methods and mutual gain, this seems a pro-social, pro-worker outcome that industrial relations should welcome and promote rather than condemn and replace. Unfortunately, such is largely not the case in the British IR tradition for it is steeped in varieties of socialism from the Webbs (state), to Cole (guild), to Flanders (ethical), and thus has an ingrained skeptical-to-hostile attitude toward employers – particularly without unions. As earlier noted, Kelly rather superficially includes studies from North America in RIR and one reason, perhaps, is that the North American IR tradition takes the opposite tack and seeks to improve rather than replace capitalist employers and reduce rather than encourage class struggle. The difference in strategies is not surprising since Rockefeller Jr. took the lead in introducing IR (now HR) departments into companies and funding the first six university IR centers (mostly in business schools), and his IR advisor WL Mackenzie King (later Canadian prime minister) wrote the first book explicitly on IR theory (King, 1918).

The field of industrial relations

Richard Hyman, Kelly’s close intellectual colleague, wrote in Industrial Relations: A Marxist Introduction (1975: x) that he hoped the book would stimulate more and better Marxist scholarship in industrial relations and, more importantly, help pave the way for ‘the abolition of “industrial relations” as it exists today through working-class struggle.’ His position logically follows from Marxist precepts since, if capitalism is an inherently exploitative and oppressive system of employment relations headed toward immiserating crisis, the better long-run approach is not to patch it up but replace it with a better alternative.

Kelly, I perceive, broadly shares Hyman’s vision for the future of industrial relations as a field and practice but does not as explicitly and categorically state it in RIR. On the other hand, Kelly is much more explicit in his criticism of the IR field as it is exists today and wrote RIR to radically change it.

A helpful framework for understanding Kelly’s critique and alternative vision is the popular IR frames of reference model (Heery, 2016) developed by Fox (1974) and extended by Budd and Bhave (2008). The model distinguishes four alternative theoretical-ideological conceptions of (capitalist) employment relationships: unitarist (HRM), egoist (labor market economics), pluralist (traditional IR), and critical-radical (labor process, Marxist). The dominant conception is that the center of the IR field is in the pluralist frame and, in particular, trade unionism, collective bargaining, and national labor policy. In Britain and the rest of Europe, the unitarist and market frames (HRM and labor economics) have traditionally not been regarded as within IR per se and, indeed, the two were long perceived as threats to IR pluralism and workers’ interests and thus to be resisted and critiqued (with some relaxation toward HRM in Britain as it has become more pluralist under IR colonization). In the US, after the mass unionization of industry in the 1930s–1940s, the field came to be seen as anchored in the pluralist frame but, opposite to Europe, with more openness and interaction with HRM and labor economics but a closed and oppositional stance toward the critical-radical frame (Kaufman and Gall, 2015). Matters get more complicated because, in recent years and in reaction to union decline, a movement has developed in North America and Britain (but not much visible in the rest of Europe) to expansively define IR as the study of all aspects of employment relationships which, in effect, expands its boundaries to include all four frames (Blyton et al., 2008: Ch. 1; Budd, 2004; Edwards, 2003; Kaufman, 2004).

Viewed against this backdrop, Kelly’s proposal in RIR is to shift IR from the pluralist to the critical-radical frame with emphasis on labor and its problems under capitalism, advancement of labor’s interests and collective mobilization, and theory and policy anchored on varieties of Marxism and socialism. So viewed, pluralism and reformism have a continued but diminishing presence, perhaps positioned as critical pluralism, while unitarist and market frames are decisively rejected and critiqued. Rather than a broad field encompassing the employment relationship and associated ensemble of social science and business school fields and disciplines, IR in Kelly’s approach narrows to a field centered on (critical) labor studies and workers’ organizations with sociology, politics, and history as lead disciplines.

Is Kelly’s proposed reorientation of IR a good idea? Would it revitalize the field? I can offer only an opinion on the first question and a speculation on the second. In the US context, it can be predicted with confidence that Kelly’s version of IR would quickly wither and die. Most people would regard it as a stalking horse for a radical-left political agenda which has almost no constituency. Even if a major Kondratiev-type economic crisis hits the US economy (expected by the author [Kaufman, 2018], but based on a non-Marxist/IR political economy model), the likely drift is not to socialism but fascism and the class war will not be between labor and capital but whites/Christians and browns/blacks/Muslims. Another problem is that Kelly’s version of IR substantially overlaps in America with the existing field of Labor Studies (started in the 1920s, serving a trade union constituency, sponsor of Labor Studies Journal) which is itself in perilous decline.

Britain and the rest of Europe provide a moderately more hospitable home for Kelly’s left-radical version of industrial relations. Nonetheless, if adopted the likely result is a substantial downward trend in IR student enrollments and faculty positions, leading universities to close IR programs and departments – perhaps as a gradual phase-out or more confrontational battle such as at Keele University (Darlington, 2009). Likewise, the British Journal of Industrial Relations could expect to lose many of its mainstream contributors and readers but, perhaps, be able to hang on like the Morning Star (Britain’s last socialist daily newspaper).

This pessimistic forecast could, of course, be quite mistaken because I misjudge the situation and balance of forces in the UK or am blind-sided by the next Kondratiev wave of class struggle and militant unionism. On the other hand, the Marxist forecasting track record does not inspire confidence either. The Communist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1920 and a newspaper article told readers (quoted in Beckett, 1995: 10), ‘The founders of the new Party believe – as most competent observers are coming to believe – that the capitalist system is collapsing.’ Collapse nearly happened in the 1930s and today there is a palpable sense the world order is unraveling in front of our eyes. I remain to be convinced, however, that Marx is a reliable guide for either rethinking industrial relations or staving-off ‘Fall of the Roman Empire, Version 2.0.’