Labor History, Industrial Relations, and the Crisis of American Labor

Abstract

In this look at the disciplinary history of industrial relations and labor history, the author focuses on the long period of disassociation between the two fields and the growing contact between them in the 1980s. He suggests that industrial relations scholars became more receptive to historical modes of thought when events such as the decline in union membership (starting in the mid-1970s) and the sharp recession of 1981–82 proved that industrial relations could not be treated like a static system, describable by invariant laws of labor economics. Similarly, he argues, labor historians, who were able to concentrate on writing “history from the bottom up” during the era of mature collective bargaining, have recently shown a revived interest in the study of institutions, politics, and power.