Shopfloor Matters Labor - Management Relations in 20th Century American Manufacturing Routledge Studies in Business Organizations and Networks Series

Building on the work of labor historians, industrial relations scholars, and institutional labor economists, this book offers not only a comprehensive analysis of the changing nature of shopfloor labor-management relations in the large manufacturing firms of this century, it also supplies empirical evidence of the effect of these institutional changes on labor productivity growth and injury rates. No other study has dealt with the broad sweep of shopfloor governence during the twentieth century, paid as careful attention to the process by which shopfloor institutional arrangements changed over these years, or offered hard evidence on the relationship between changing shopfloor institutions and changing shopfloor outcomes.

INTRODUCTION A brief account of Shopfloor Matters; The contributions of Shopfloor Matters 1 FROM EXIT TO VOICE IN SHOPFLOOR GOVERNANCE 2 THE AMOSKEAG PLAN OF REPRESENTATION 3 THE RISE OF AN EMPOWERED SHOPFLOOR VOICE 4 LABOR-MANAGEMENT DISPUTES IN MEAT PACKING, 1936–41 5 INSTITUTIONALIZATION AND DECLINE IN WORKERS’ SHOPFLOOR POWER 6 POSTWAR COLLECTIVE-BARGAINING AGREEMENTS 7 CONTEMPORARY EXPERIMENTS WITH NEW SYSTEMS OF SHOPFLOOR GOVERNANCE 8 A VISIT TO SATURN 9 THE FUTURE OF US SHOPFLOOR GOVERNANCE

David Fairris is Associate Professor of Economics at the University of California, Riverside. He has published widely in professional journals on the subject of working conditions and shopfloor labor-management relations.