This book examines how a group of manufacturers of metal products in America's third largest city helped each other to meet the challenges of organized labor (and sometimes an interventionist state) in the half-century between the "second industrial revolution" and the Second World War. It analyzes labor issues by means of a careful local case study, but its conclusions about the interplay of labor, organized capital, law, and the state in determining the fate of workers' rights and employers' interests have broad relevance to the history and politics of twentieth-century industrial...

Industrial Democracy in America begins its close examination of what came to be known among collars of any color as "the labor problem" with the railroad strikes of the 1870s. The contributors cover the theory and practice of the American labor movement, the promise and demise of industrial jurisprudence, the law of collective bargaining, workplace contractualism, and shop-floor reality in the United States auto industry, and compare these with employment systems in Japan. Industrial Democracy in America contemplates America's industrial decline and will provoke questions, even within...

This book examines how a group of manufacturers of metal products in America's third largest city helped each other to meet the challenges of organized labor (and sometimes an interventionist state) in the half-century between the "second industrial revolution" and the Second World War. It analyzes labor issues by means of a careful local case study, but its conclusions about the interplay of labor, organized capital, law, and the state in determining the fate of workers' rights and employers' interests have broad relevance to the history and politics of twentieth-century industrial...