A Field in Flux: Sixty Years of Industrial Relations

By Robert B. McKersie and Thomas A. Kochan

A Field in Flux chronicles the extraordinary journey of industrial and labor relations expert Robert McKersie. One of the most important industrial relations scholars and leaders of our time, McKersie pioneered the study of labor negotiations, helping to formulate the concepts of distributive and integrative bargaining that have served as analytical tools for understanding the bargaining process more generally.

The book provides a window into McKersie's life and work and its impact on the evolution of labor and industrial relations. Spanning six decades, the reader learns about the intersection of labor and the Civil Rights movement, the watershed moment of the Air Traffic Controller's Strike, his relationship with George Schultz, the shift from labor relations to human resource management, and McKersie's role in the seminal cases (Motorola, GM, Toyota) of the labor movement.

A Field in Flux serves two important functions: it demonstrates how people have influenced past employment policies and practices when called to action in critical situations, and it seeks to instill confidence in those who will be called on to address the big challenges facing the future of work today and in the years to come.

During a time when the basic values of industrial relations are being challenged and violated, McKersie argues that the profession must adapt to the changing world of work and not forget about the value placed on efficiency, equity, and inclusive employment policies and practices.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781501740039

Book preview

A FIELD IN FLUX

Sixty Years of Industrial Relations

ROBERT B. MCKERSIE

Foreword by Thomas A. Kochan

PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

My wife and four children have been with me on this journey, and I dedicate this book to them

Journeying is an art.… If we stop, we don’t go forward

and we also miss the goal.

—POPE FRANCIS

CONTENTS

Foreword by Thomas A. Kochan

Acknowledgments

1. An Industrial Relations Journey

2. Apprenticeship

3. Becoming a Journeyman

4. Managing a Shop

5. Returning to the Bench

6. Taking Stock and Looking Ahead

Notes

Bibliography

Index

FOREWORD

The history and evolution of a field of inquiry can be written by reviewing key historical events or by highlighting the people who shaped those events. This book combines these two methods to produce a creative, engaging, and insightful commentary on the last sixty years of industrial relations. In fact, it goes even further, because the author is himself one of those people who has shaped the field, and because he is at the center of so much of the field of inquiry the history is also a personal journey.

A Field in Flux serves two important functions: it demonstrates how people have influenced past employment policies and practices when called to action in critical situations, and it seeks to instill confidence in those who will be called on to address the big challenges facing the future of work now and in the years to come.

We live in a very troubled time, one in which so many of the basic values and principles of industrial relations are being challenged and, in some cases, downright violated. The moral of the story covered in this book is that as we adapt to a changing world of work we must not forget about the value we place on efficiency, equity, and inclusive employment policies and practices. Norms that come through loud and clear in this book are worth carrying forward: showing respect for all who work, championing the cause for voice and worker representation in a democratic society, and engaging professionals both to learn from their experiences and to foster innovations. Nothing could be more energizing to those who will take this field of study and practice into the future.

This book could be written only by one remarkable individual, Robert B. McKersie. Bob chronicles the unique and personal journey through his career and, in doing so, provides a window into the life and work of one of the most important industrial relations scholars and leaders of our time—if not the most important. I’ve been privileged to work with Bob for a good part of his sixty-year career, and I am pleased to offer a few words about how he has helped shape the events discussed in this book and our field of study.

In a piece commenting on Bob’s lifetime achievement award from the International Conflict Management Association, Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld and I described Bob as an integrative scholar. It was an obvious play on one of the central concepts in his 1965 book with Richard Walton, A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations, about which you will learn more in the pages that follow. But it was also a statement about McKersie the friend, mentor, and colleague to the legions of people he has influenced over his career. As we wrote, ‘Say hello to Bob McKersie for me.’ How many times have either of us heard someone at a professional meeting ask us to say this to Bob next time we see him? It is more than a perfunctory request. Bob’s warmth and friendship and his impact on those he has interacted with over the last sixty years far surpasses the surface memories people have of each other, many of which fade over time. Not with Bob.

The McKersie most people know is one who always reads what students and colleagues send his way. No one ever comes back empty-handed. His suggestions are always preceded by encouraging comments. He takes a genuine interest in what those around him are doing and presses them to dig a bit deeper, to go back into the field to learn more about how things actually work. When the work is completed, he celebrates and promotes the author.

Bob has probably opened more doors to useful contacts for students and young scholars than anyone else in our profession. He did just that for me when I was an entry-level faculty member at Cornell University. I remember when he took me by the arm at a reception at a professional meeting. You have to meet my friend Jack Sheinkman, he said. He will be interested in what you are doing. It was the beginning of a lifelong friendship and partnership in several key efforts with Jack, who was president of the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union. Just about everyone Bob knows has one or more stories like mine.

There is a side of Bob that only those who have seen him up close in action can fully appreciate. He is one of the most persistent advocates for fairness I’ve ever met. He can’t let an injustice go unaddressed. You will read in chapter 3 about his work on civil rights in Chicago during the 1960s and get a flavor of that part of his personality. How many junior faculty members today would have the gumption to get involved in what was then the most profound social movement of the day at such a level of intensity that the Reverend Jesse Jackson was compelled to do a video on Bob’s work fifty years later? (For his remarks, see Jesse Jackson, "Making Sense of the Senseless: Fifty Years after Selma and A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations," Negotiation Journal 51, no. 4 (2015): 459–60, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nejo.12128.)

Another side of Bob is his modesty. Several of us who read early drafts of this book had to push him to overcome his reluctance to give himself credit for his own contributions to our field. The best example comes from our first reading of chapter 3, about his time at the University of Chicago. The early draft detailed the accomplishments of giants such as George Shultz and others, for page after page, followed by a single paragraph that essentially said (I’m paraphrasing), Oh, by the way, Dick Walton and I wrote a book during those years.

Well, that book—The Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiations—became a fifty-year classic. Several of us who read that draft of this volume’s chapter 3 had to insist that Bob expand on what was written to discuss the important role the book played and continues to play in the study, teaching, and practice of negotiations. And we went further, constituting a kind of kitchen cabinet to make sure Bob didn’t get away with any more omissions of that sort.

Here, in their own brief words, are why these colleagues were eager to do so. Fred K. Foulkes, professor of organizational behavior and director of the Human Resource Policy Institute at Boston University, comments, Bob excels in giving back. His great questions and wise perspectives always make a difference, whether it is with respect to a labor-management matter or a personal career issue. David B. Lipsky, Anne Evans Estabrook Professor of Dispute Resolution at Cornell University’s ILR School, notes that Bob’s illustrious career coincides with many of the most significant changes that have occurred in the field of industrial relations. While his characteristic humility keeps him from taking credit, he exercised leadership through many of these changes—and also transformed the ILR School at Cornell, as dean, into one of the nation’s foremost research centers on labor and employment relations. Mary Rowe, an adjunct professor in work and organization studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management comments, The precepts of negotiation theory that Bob helped develop are simple, elegant, and of extraordinary power in helping to understand all interactions of two or more points of view. They are taught around the world and are on track to endure, quite possibly, forever. I use them as an ombudsperson, as a family member, in consulting, in seeking to understand world events—and even, wryly, in negotiating with myself when I have two or more points of view about something. And Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld, a professor at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University notes that Bob McKersie’s career has not only tracked but also shaped the evolution of industrial relations. He has helped me appreciate, among other things, the centrality of the internal bargaining needed for lateral alignment, the integrative potential in what others may view as intransient conflicts, and the importance of tackling big issues.

Let me end with a little vignette that encapsulates pretty much all you need to know about McKersie before you join him on his journey through time in our field.

On a Friday evening in 1988, at about 6:00 p.m., Bob and I were returning from a conference we had attended together. We were both living in the Boston suburb of Arlington and had driven to Logan Airport together in Bob’s 1964 Chevy Nova, which he had inherited from an uncle who could no longer drive. I can best describe the car as a small tank largely held together in various places by bits of duct tape.

When we got in the car at Logan to head home, Bob said in his own cautionary voice, This vehicle hasn’t been running well lately, but it should be okay. True to his warning, it started hard, but with Bob’s expert coaxing it got going, and off we went.

Traffic was very heavy coming out of the airport during that Friday rush hour, so Bob proceeded to get on what was then a narrow but heavily jammed Route 1A to get to one of the shortcuts he likes to find around Boston. No sooner did we get out in the middle of the road than the old Nova stalled—and, despite Bob’s best efforts, would not start again. Meanwhile, the traffic was quickly piling up, unable to get around us. What to do?

I noticed a couple of young fellows, two vehicles behind us, in an old pickup truck, and the driver was blowing his horn in obvious agitation over the gridlock. Bob and I had a thought. Since we were only about two hundred feet from an exit, perhaps they could push us down the off-ramp and we could coast to some safe spot so the traffic could move on.

I got out of the Nova, went to the pickup, and described the dilemma. If you guys would push the car to the exit, I said, we can probably coast down and you and everyone else can move on.

Their initial response was no way.

I thought about what Bob would have said next, appealing to our common interests: We’re all stuck here until the Nova can be moved. That didn’t work. So then I appealed to another interest they might have. Look, I said. I’ll pay you something for doing this. How about ten dollars?

They looked at each other, and one responded, Fifty.

No way, I said. That’s too much. Look, it’s only about two hundred feet, and you’ll be on your way. Then I took a risk and made a final counteroffer, pulling out a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and handing it to them. This is what I have.

Okay, they said, we’ll do it.

And they did! We managed to maneuver their truck behind the car and they pushed Bob’s small tank of a vehicle to the ramp with enough momentum that it could coast down the exit. And off they went. This was what Bob describes in chapter 5 as integrative bargaining—a win-win solution. They got out of a traffic jam and made twenty dollars in the process, and we got off the highway.

In true McKersie fashion, though, the best part of the story was yet to come. As we coasted down the ramp, Bob spied a parking lot where we could safely get off the road. He pulled in and noticed some fellows gathered around a trash barrel fire for warmth. They were wearing picket signs. Bob instantly recognized them as Teamsters from Local 25 and said that he knew George Cashman, the local president. So he went over to them and asked what they were striking about. It was some sort of grievance with management of the terminal across the street.

Bob struck up a conversation about his work with Cashman and they all began to bond. Then he told them that his car wasn’t working and that he might have to leave it in the lot overnight until he could get it towed. No problem, they said. They were going to be there and promised to take care of it, which they did.

Over the years, I’ve watched and admired the various ways in which Bob McKersie’s personal values and lifestyle—including his well-known frugality when it comes to family vehicles—have interacted and intersected with his professional skills and experiences. I learned to apply the lessons he taught us all in negotiations, and then I watched the master at work, building trusting relationships that would pay dividends down the road—like the willingness of a group of workers, strangers only a few minutes earlier, to guard his vehicle that night in East Boston because of his prior work with their union leader.

This tells you a bit about the man and about the field he has studied, practiced, and led for longer than just about any other scholar in our field. His sixty-year journey, recounted in this book, is full of stories that introduce you to people he worked with and the impact they had on the evolving field of industrial relations. Enjoy.

Thomas A. Kochan

Cambridge, Massachusetts

July 31, 2018

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As Pope Francis has observed, keep going and good things will happen. That certainly has been my experience. This entire book has been an acknowledgment for the counseling and collegiality that has come my way from many, many students and faculty who I have encountered in my journey over the past six decades. So, in one sense, I could stop here and urge you to read the chapters to identify the individuals who have shared their wisdom and passion for understanding the complexities inherent in industrial relations.

Beyond my academic associates, I owe much to the practitioners who have been willing to go the extra mile in helping me understand the ever-evolving territory of our field. Industrial relations has to be studied where it takes place, and I thank the many workers and labor and corporate leaders who have opened their doors for me.

There is one set of individuals who need a special shout-out: the members of the kitchen cabinet Tom Kochan assembled to urge me to get going on this project, and who along the way have provided invaluable feedback and augmentation of the stories that needed to be told. The following colleagues have provided this counsel: Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld of Brandeis University; Fred Foulkes of Boston University; Dave Lipsky of the ILR School at Cornell University; and Mary Rowe of MIT.

Academics like to think their prose is precise and elegant and needs no editing. If I ever held that view, this project has demonstrated the value and importance of a good editor. Scott Cooper has been outstanding in so many ways, making sense when the text was obscure and sharing his insights about many subjects (he is a student of labor history). Most important, he’s been fun to have on the other end of the phone line.

While most of us old-timers try to use modern-day word processing, Cherie Potts has provided a big assist. And Jackie Martelli has been invaluable in helping gather photos (and the permission to use them) for the center section, thus bringing life to many of the individuals who appear in this chronicle.

I have dedicated this book to my wife Nancy and to our children William, Elizabeth, Robert, and Alison, who have been with me on this journey in so many important ways. Their support has given me the time and space to pursue a career focused on identifying the lessons that this amazing field of industrial relations has to offer.

Chapter 1

AN INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS JOURNEY

I spent the fall semester of the 1979–80 academic year at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). At the time, I was on leave from the ILR School at Cornell University. I was already scheduled to spend the following spring on sabbatical in England. My time at Sloan was aimed at determining whether there was a potential fit between its courses in industrial relations and my interests. I was considering a move.

The following fall, in 1980, I joined Sloan’s industrial relations group, as did Thomas Kochan—my colleague from Cornell whom I had brought to the ILR School and with whom I had worked closely on research projects. Little did I know that the first decade at MIT would be one of tectonic shifts in labor relations in both the public and private sectors, as well as in the academic field of industrial relations. And I could not have foreseen that the transformation that was happening would prompt a multiyear faculty and student collaborative effort to understand what was unfolding before our eyes.

That work required taking a new look in new ways at a field that had long been doing the same things in the same ways. The success of what we called the transformation project can be traced in part to a combination of factors: our own fresh start, the fresh eyes of collaborating faculty colleagues and tremendously talented graduate students, and the MIT culture, characterized by a problem-solving focus coupled with innovative ways of addressing those problems. The result was to breathe new life into our field, which had become somewhat staid. And while the ILR School continued to flourish at Cornell, a succession of large-scale research projects involving collaborative teams of MIT faculty and doctoral students leveraged the MIT culture in ways that introduced new areas of research and transformed our understanding of the field.

This book tells the story of industrial relations from my personal perspective over more than sixty years, a period during which I have been fortunate to observe the field as a student, a newly appointed professor, a dean, and a senior faculty member. In these chapters, I explore the evolution of industrial relations, drawing on my personal journey and recounting interactions with a large number of the field’s leading figures from my graduate school days at Harvard University to my current emeritus faculty role at MIT, with stops along the way at the University of Chicago and Cornell. I also draw on my encounters with business and union leaders as I did fieldwork and when these leaders came to campus. And I introduce and discuss some of the major events and dramatic changes to the field over six decades.

I can think of no better way to chronicle this story than through what I have learned from and admired in the people who are part of my story while at the same time observing events as they unfolded. What we can learn from my own history in this field of study, and what can help guide industrial relations into the future, are the major topics of this book.

My First Encounters with an Evolving Field of Study and Practice

My first formal encounters with industrial relations occurred at Harvard Business School (HBS) in the late 1950s, both in courses and in encounters with a group of distinguished scholars authoring what turned out to be one of the landmark studies of collective bargaining.¹ It was a decade during which labor-management relations were front and center in the business world. There were no clues then about the future decline of unions.

At the University of Chicago in the next decade, the 1960s, I was a new faculty member in an industrial relations group headed by George Shultz. As unionization in the public sector was growing among school teachers and other public-sector workers, it was beginning to decline in the private sector, although not in a way that was especially visible—at least not yet. Our attention shifted to technological change and worker displacement, as well as to how to fashion more effective equal employment opportunity and related labor market policies.

The 1970s took me to Cornell University to be dean of the ILR School. That placed me in a position to foster research on a variety of topics, especially worker alienation and the quality of work life. The ILR School had a mandate from the state, and research on collective bargaining in the public sector was a particular concentration. The decline in private-sector union membership that had by then been underway for two decades was not on the agenda of many faculty in the ILR School. Gradually, as we recruited a new generation of faculty trained more deeply in the mother disciplines of economics and the behavioral sciences and more skilled in state-of-the-art research methods, the faculty expertise diversified and deepened in labor economics, human resource management, and organizational behavior. At the same time, new faculty in collective bargaining and labor history—the areas that had been and continue to be central to the ILR School’s core identity—also adopted theory and methods from these allied disciplines. As a result, the school evolved with the changing nature of work and employment relations.

I have been based at the Sloan School at MIT since 1980, participating in studies that have tracked the fundamental changes occurring in labor and management relations throughout our economy. In my earliest years at MIT, even if President Ronald Reagan had not fired the air traffic controllers in 1981 and thus sent a powerful message to employers that they could take on their unions, it still would have been clear that something substantially different was occurring in industrial relations. Recognizing this fundamental shift opened up the MIT program to a steady diversification of interests by faculty and PhD students alike.

My Personal History

My particular take on industrial relations, though, has to be contextualized with how I came to be involved with the discipline at all. When I was a boy, my Uncle Jim was a conductor on the Erie Railroad. That was a union job. My Uncle Lester was a housepainter; my Uncle David was a letter carrier; my mother was a schoolteacher; and my father worked at the post office and was in the clerks’ union—all close relatives working in jobs typically represented by unions. Still, I don’t recall any talk about unions at family gatherings when I was young.

A piece of my father’s history, however, is relevant—and it was only after I became interested in labor-management relations at HBS that I learned much about it. It turns out my father had participated in a large general strike in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1914 called by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) under the leadership of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Big Bill Haywood (in his later years my father remembered their names and even commented on Haywood’s height).² The strike sought to improve conditions in the textile mill where my father then worked. The union headquarters was my hometown of Haledon, New Jersey, in a house owned by Italian immigrants. The strikers couldn’t meet in Paterson but were afforded a hospitable environment by Haledon’s socialist mayor.

Perhaps these family connections opened me up to the possibility of pursuing industrial relations as a career. But there is also my fascination with an industry—specifically, the transportation industry—that grew from my fascination with its product.

I have always loved transportation, and especially public transportation. It’s not that I dislike getting behind the wheel of a car; it’s just that early on I developed a preference for leaving the driving to someone else.

The enjoyments of travel by bus were imprinted on me during the four years I commuted from my home in Haledon to Central High School in Paterson, some six miles away. I doubt whether I did much homework during the twenty to thirty minutes of transit time, but the interlude gave me an opportunity to observe the passing scene—and daydream.

I also liked trains as a youngster, my brother and I owned a model train set, and, as mentioned, my Uncle Jim worked as a conductor on the Erie Railroad. My father would take us to the train station that adjoined the Paterson post office, where he worked at the time, so we could see the real thing. Big steam locomotives would pass through town; the highlight for me was watching the exchange of mailbags that happened without the train even stopping in the station. Later, when I attended the University of Pennsylvania as an undergraduate, actual travel by train became familiar to me; it was the best means for getting to and from Philadelphia during those four years. I would board the train in Newark and, about ninety minutes later, arrive at Thirtieth Street Station in the City of Brotherly Love.

Railroading holds many memories and is still my favorite mode of travel. While my colleagues at the Cornell ILR School would drive from Ithaca to Albany—a distance of about 170 miles—to conduct business with state agencies, I would instead drive the roughly sixty miles to Syracuse, park the car, and take the train. Doing so would take about twice as much time as driving directly, but the train from Syracuse followed the Erie Canal and afforded many fine views of small (former) manufacturing towns such as Amsterdam and Canajoharie.

For me, air travel came earlier than expected. In June 1948, I was a member of the freshman crew team at Penn as the end-of-season Poughkeepsie Regatta approached. I wanted to participate, but it would mean missing the start of summer training for the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) and the West Coast departure of my assigned ship. Fortunately, my unit’s commanding officer solved that dilemma by booking a seat for me on the Nonstop Hotshot—the Naval Air Transport Service’s famous overnight flight between Washington, D.C., and Moffett Field in San Francisco. We were in the air for something like ten or twelve hours.

Between NROTC training and three years of active duty in the U.S. Navy, I traveled long distances on water and visited many parts of the world. Being on the water is always special for me, whether in a shell rowing crew or as a sailor on a battleship.

Then there’s trucking. I confess to a strong desire to get behind the wheel of a large eighteen-wheeler. So far in my love affair with transportation, though, that dream remains unrealized; at best, I have enjoyed getting behind the wheel of a small rental truck on a few occasions.

While I cannot say so for certain, this fascination with transportation could have greased the wheels for the trajectory my career would take. While a graduate student at HBS, I took a very satisfying course titled Problems in Labor Relations that led me to sign up for a more focused course on labor negotiations. I found the subject fascinating, and wondered what had predisposed me to be so interested in the discipline. My studies in electrical engineering certainly had not primed me in any way to understand or provide insight into union-management relations.

In the end, whatever it was that impelled me into industrial relations as an academic discipline—fascination with an industry, my family history, compelling graduate courses, or a combination of all three—it became my life’s work.

What Came before My Time?

Although in this book I focus on the evolution of industrial relations as an academic field of study from the 1950s onward, a few words about its origins and earlier history are needed to set the stage for the chapters that follow. Most scholars point to the work of John R. Commons and his students at the University of Wisconsin in the first three decades of the twentieth century as the beginning of the study of industrial relations in the United States. Indeed, Commons is generally regarded as the father of U.S. industrial relations, as Sidney and Beatrice Webb are viewed as the parents of the discipline in Britain.³ The key insights of these pioneering scholars, which have endured over the years, are well documented elsewhere and thus need only brief mention here.⁴

First, labor, unlike other factors of production, is more than a commodity that responds passively to the economic forces of supply and demand.