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No description available.

The thesis examines the reactions of policy-making managements of large industrial firms to the challenges to their power and authority accompanying the organization of relatively strong unions in the later 1930s and 1940s. It describes and explains the transformation in its approach to labour relations forced upon, American management during this period, setting this against a background account of the indus- trial relations strategies large firms followed in the pre-union era. It relates in detail the problems of labour relations American business encountered in the war period and immediately after, and examines the ideology and world-view of management as revealed in its perceptions of its problems. The second half of the thesis describes a successful 'recovery of the initiative' in industrial relations policy and practice by American management. It examines the contributions of large corporations and their pressure-groups to the reorientation of public policy towards organized labour which culminated in the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act. It goes on to discuss the collective bargaining strategies of large manufacturers (particularly in the automotive industry) in the late 1940s, arguing that they acted with realism and conscious purpose to stabilize in-plant labour relations on terms acceptable to themselves. Management accepted unions - but acted to restrict their power, and compelled them to behave 'responsibly'. The final chapters examine other means by which management aimed to outflank and undermine unions, and to restore its own power and prestige - methods which .have usually been neglected by business and labour historians alike. The objectives and rationales of personnel administration, 'welfare capitalism' , in-plant propaganda, and public relations are analysed. Throughout, the emphasis is on managerial motivation, and on the ideological bases of business policy, as much as on actual practice. This is partly because the sources of the study include the rhetoric of the business community as well as the records of its behaviour. The work is, however, more than a partial intellectual history of American business: it concent- rates on practical men's perceptions and analyses of problems which confronted them, and on the rationales they produced for the actions they took.

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This dissertation is concerned with "third-party" or "external" effects that pervade the economic dimension of human action. As an instance of these effects, actions in a specific market, the labor market, are isolated and studied. In the first part of the dissertation, the evolution of labor law in the United States is traced from the earliest recorded labor court case in 1806 through the present. In examining the dialogue surrounding changes in labor entitlements, it is found that the ubiquity of external effects in the labor relation has been historically recognized by lawmakers as they grappled with the design of optimal legal rules. The second part begins with an examination of economists' views of the labor relation. A survey of views indicates that economists have failed to approach labor actions in a manner that is both analytic and cognizant of the pervasive interdependence in labor. The concluding chapter of the dissertation attempts to integrate the disparate viewpoints of lawmakers and economists py viewing labor actions in a manner which highlights the external effects. Borrowing from the literature on "externalities," the chapter demonstrates that there exists a continuum of possible magnitudes of external effects in labor. / Doctor of Philosophy

This investigation is a study of grievance machinery in industrial relations, as it operates within the Eighth Regional War Labor Board, which serves the states of Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. By grievance machinery is meant the formal procedure through which the worker or his representative must proceed in order to get a grievance or complaint about working conditions, wages, or other items, heard and settled.

High-profile instances of workplace violence and increased pressure from competitors have threatened the viability of one of the nation's largest employers, the United States Postal Service (USPS). As a result, the USPS began a massive change effort in the early 1990's. One of the initiatives implemented to improve labor-management relations was a derivative of the self-managed work team known as the crew chief program. This study provides a mixed-methods and multi-level approach to understand the impact this unique program had on organizational attitudes. The first aim of this study was to investigate whether the crew chief program reduced employees' stress and strain and improved job and supervisory satisfaction and company and union commitment, while controlling for the nesting of employees within sites and employee demographic characteristics. The second aim was to replicate and extend the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) model of stress and to determine whether employee perceptions of crew chief support moderated the relationships between stressors, strain, and outcomes. I evaluated Aim 1 using data from 177 mail processors from 27 units matched from baseline to one-year follow-up with hierarchical linear modeling. This was followed up with an implementation analysis of qualitative data to determine the extent to which the program was implemented compared to the original design. I evaluated Aim 2 using structural equation modeling from 538 mail processors who participated at follow-up. There was little quantitative support for Aim 1. However, the results of the implementation analysis suggested that the crew chief program was not functioning as conceived. Aim 2 received strong support, with almost all of the main effects of the SSO model replicated. However, there was no support for the moderator effects. Additionally, I found role ambiguity to have direct relationships with other organizational outcomes beyond the indirect effects via strain and that crew chief support was strongly related to stressors and outcomes. These findings reinforce the notion that employing both quantitative and qualitative methods can dramatically improve the quality of organizational research. Based on these findings, I describe several suggestions for improvements to this specific program and for improving future initiatives aimed at enhancing labor-management relations.