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Industrial Relations Research and Social Theory1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

C. W. M. Hart
C. W. M. Hart*
Affiliation:
The University of Wisconsin
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Extract

The aim of this paper is to consider the connexion between social theory and research in the field of “industrial relations,” drawing particularly upon the empirical data which have been acquired by a sociological investigation of the city of Windsor, Ontario. Even a cursory investigation of a city like Windsor indicates certain tendencies to be at work in highly unionized towns which do not seem to be adequately encompassed by the existing literature of industrial relations. We are concerned here to define what these tendencies are, to suggest some of the inadequacies of existing theory to handle them and to indicate a more adequate theoretical basis for the discussion of them.

The traditional academic and research approach to trade unionism has always been that of economics, and it is usually within an economic framework that unionism is discussed. A sociologist, however, who approaches the subject for the first time, begins immediately to wonder why trade unions should have become, in our universities and research institutions, so exclusively matter for study by economists, whereas other social groupings in which men live and to which they give their time and their loyalties—churches, for example, or gangs, or families—have not excited the slightest interest on the part of that discipline. The answer to this question has its roots, it would seem, in the classical view that since everything in the market is a commodity, and labour is in the market, therefore labour is a commodity, and as such, has to be treated and studied by the academic discipline whose job it is to analyse market factors, of which labour costs are one.

Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science/Revue canadienne de economiques et science politique , Volume 15 , Issue 1 , February 1949 , pp. 53 - 73
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1949

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Footnotes

1

This paper was read in the Sociology section of the Canadian Political Science Association in Vancouver on June 16, 1948.

References

2 The full results of the sociological investigation of Windsor, undertaken by the present writer during 1947 and 1948, under the auspices and on behalf of the Institute of Industrial Relations, University of Toronto, will shortly be published by the Institute in a research monograph entitled Report on Windsor. Readers of the present paper are referred to that monograph for fuller discussion of many of the statements (necessarily of an arbitrary kind) made in the following pages.

3 Cf. Drucker, Peter, Concept of the Corporation (New York, 1946), p. 256.Google Scholar

4 Vide V. W. Bladen's presidential address in the August, 1948, number of the Journal and C. W. M. Hart, “The Hawthorne Experiments” (ibid., vol. IX, no. 2, May, 1943).

5 Boston, 1947.

6 There are, of course, exceptions to this generalization, such as Selekman, B. M., Labor Relations and Human Relations (New York, 1947)Google Scholar, but Selekman's interests and research are peripheral to the main Mayo group.

7 Mayo, , Social Problems (Boston, 1945), pp. 7–8.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., p. 9.

9 There are at least two explicit studies of highly unionized towns, with labour-community relations as the central theme. One is Warner, W. Lloyd and Low, J. O., The Social System of a Modern Factory (Vol. IV of the Yankee City Series, New Haven, 1947)Google Scholar, the other Jones, A. W., Life, Liberty and Property (New York, 1941).Google Scholar Both of these give valuable pictures of certain aspects of unionism, but neither of them focus their main attention upon unions as institutions; Warner and Low because the whole Yankee City study was focused upon the class structure of Yankee City, and Jones because his primary concern was with the methodology of attitude—counting and public opinion polling.

10 Cf. Jones, , Life, Liberty and Property, for attitudes in Kraus, Akron. Henry, The Many and the Few (Los Angeles, 1947)Google Scholar, for some insights into Flint; and Harbison, F. H. and Dubin, R., Patterns of Union-Management Relations (Chicago, 1947)Google Scholar, for a few slight hints regarding South Bend. The suggestion regarding the Canadian towns mentioned is based on very superficial general knowledge and on conversations with U.A.W. regional officers, many of whom worked in those U.A.W. centres at some time.

11 It is not going too far, I think, to suggest a very strong similarity between the “lift” which the Hawthorne workers got from being interviewed in the original interviewing programme at Hawthorne, and the “lift” which the obscure union member gets from bringing his petty but poignant problem to the union president or secretary-treasurer and hearing him get busy on the phone to the City Hall or the Rent Control Board or the agency involved. When he goes home to his family and to work next day, he says to his family and friends with a great deal of pride and restored morale: “the union is doing something about it.” Cf. Roethlisberger, F. C. and Dickson, W.J., Management and the Worker (Cambridge, Mass., 1939), p. 227.Google Scholar

12 The signing of the General Motors agreement in June, 1948, as illustrated in all the newspapers of the country demonstrates the difference in status. The international officers, coated, are seated at the table; the local presidents (including Mr. R. T. Leonard, formerly international vice-president, now president of his local) stand, coatless, in the background.

13 Selekman, , Labor Relations and Human Relations, p. 177.Google Scholar

14 The anti-union forces in Windsor are so eager to distort any fact, in order to damage the unions, that I think it necessary to mention that the bar is closed during union meetings.

15 Cf. the varied activities of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America as extensively reported in Life for June 28, 1948.

16 Harbison and Dubin, Patterns of Union-Management Relations.

17 This view and the evidence upon which it is based is discussed at length in Report on Windsor referred to above.

18 Any experienced researcher will recognize that such an opinion is not dreamed up out of a clear sky but is the result of a great deal of informal probing both into what people in key positions say and abstain from saying; a great deal of weighing of incidents that happen and the reasons various people give as to why they happen, and the testing of various “hunches” to determine which one fits best all of the observable facts.

19 In the original sit-down strike at Flint in January, 1937, when Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan was enquiring into the shooting at Fisher Plant No. 2, whereby fourteen sit-downers were wounded by gunfire, he was told by the local sheriff, “General Motors didn't want it, it was those small business men, those self-starters.” Kraus, , The Many and the Few, pp. 144–5.Google Scholar

20 Such a trend is much further developed in Canada than in the United States, because, of course, of the political immaturity of the latter country.

21 Tannenbaum, Frank, “The Balance of Power in Society” (Political Science Quarterly, vol. LXI, no. 4, 12, 1946).Google Scholar

22 Mayo, , The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization, foreword, pp. viii–ix.Google Scholar