HRER504:

Introduction to Labor Relations Process

Learning from History

Learning about labor history can teach us a lot about our current labor relations environment. Our labor history has shaped our labor law, our labor practices, and even the tone of the employment relationship. Santayana suggests that we study history to learn from the past—not only to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past but also perhaps to learn and attempt to emulate the successes of the past.

As we look at labor relations history in relation to today, we can see that there are often more similarities than we might initially believe. During the industrialization period that led to the growth of the labor movement, we saw that there was a great deal of consolidation, monopoly, and monopsony power. Corporate giants like Standard Oil and Carnegie Steel dominated their consumer and labor markets. While antitrust laws passed early in the 20th century were meant to address and break up these monopolies, by many measures we see just as much of not more monopoly/oligopoly and monopsony/oligopsony power. Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz points to this power as leading to the ability of rent seeking as well as domination and exploitation of workers.

We hear in the documentary The Inheritance that a mantra existed during this industrialization period: “Why hire a man for a dollar, when you can hire a child for a dime?” Child labor was a norm in industries in the United States. Today, we also see millions of adult Americans out of work and seeking work, while American children (high schoolers) work on a regular basis. We also see some of the worst forms of child labor in the United States, especially in farming. We also see these worst forms of child labor throughout U.S.-company supply chains, from the minerals of the Congo mined by children as young as 4, to the fast-fashion industry exploitation of child labor in Bangladesh, and in nearly every industry in between, child labor continues to be an industrial norm.

In the years covered in The Inheritance, we see immigrant labor being exploited and often used against domestic laborers. The lesson vignette about the Pressed Steel Car Company shows us how immigrant labor was used as a weapon against workers and also shows some of the drastic exploitation that occurred. Today in the U.S., we see this pattern continue. From the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Hoffman Plastic Compounds, which allowed employers to avoid back pay to undocumented workers who were fired in violation of the NLRA, to the exposés of immigrant workers being exploited in the meatpacking industry (e.g., Blood, Sweat, and Fear by Lance Compa) that read so much like the Sinclair’s The Jungle, to the JI Pickle Case that exposed a pattern of brutal exploitation of immigrant laborers in the United States.

At the same time that we see the exploitation of immigrants both yesterday and today, we see similarities in the praise of wealth. Today, we praise titans of industry, like Bill Gates, Jack Welch, and Jeff Bezos, in the same way that Frick, Carnegie, Gould, Rockefeller, and Mellon were praised in the time of the robber barons.

We also see an overlap in the outcomes of yesterday and today, with 1 in 4 wage earners in the United States earning below a living wage, even before the recessions of 2000, 2008, and 2020. Today in the United States, 75% of wage earners live paycheck to paycheck, despite returning to the incredible amount of working hours we saw before the battle for the 8-hour workday was won. Disasters like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911 seem to be mirrored by the disasters at the Upper Big Branch mine; the Sago Mine; West, Texas, fertilizer plant; and the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.

In terms of business practices, it is hard to miss the overlap between yesterday’s welfare capitalism and today’s human resource management or to overlook the similarities between the company unions and self-managed work teams and other company-organized work teams.