Abstract
The dominant interpretation of industrial relations in the UK and USA from 1945 to 1980 emphasizes the “power” of trade unions and manual workers, which narrowed the agency of employers and managers. This involves a linear “rise and fall” narrative, where stable economic growth provided trade unions with an advantage which they exploited and then squandered. Such narrative is shown in this chapter to be inaccurate. Many workers encountered substantial reversals in the 1950s and 1960s. The 1970s, by comparison, often characterized as beset by industrial and social chaos, was for many workers a decade of progress. Labor’s bargaining power was constrained by deindustrialization from the late 1950s onward. The linear narrative of general improvement is further qualified by the experiences of female and ethnic minority employees, who struggled to secure justice in the workplace. Class also remained a key fault line. Collective bargaining was retarded in most manual and many white-collar settings by employer objections to sharing control over the organization of work. Business power, not union power, was the chief characteristic of industrial relations in both the USA and the UK from 1945 to 1980.
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Phillips, J. (2019). Industrial Relations in the “Golden Age” in the UK and the USA, 1945 to 1980. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Management History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62348-1_37-1
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