Union decline and renewal

Focusing on the US experience, Milkman (Reference Milkman2020) argues that two factors constitute the core of the literature seeking to explain the decline in trade union density. First, employers have weakened unions’ ability to perform their multiple functions by outsourcing and adopting labour-saving technologies that reduced the manufacturing workforce that had driven the labour upsurge during the New Deal era. The second factor is that government officials and courts have weakened the union powers established by the 1935 National Labor Relations Act. Visser (Reference Visser2024), by contrast, has confronted how the decline might be reversed by posing four scenarios: marginalisation, dualism, substitution, and revitalisation. The contributions of both scholars, however, are problematic for neither addresses the decline in the significance of unions’ capacity to stabilise the macroeconomy by harmonising productivity growth and consumption. This function was deemed of major importance during the years of high productivity growth that ended in the 1970s. However, with the end of the productivity wave, the topic came to be seen as of marginal importance, as illustrated by Freeman and Medoff’s (Reference Freeman and Medoff1984) influential What Do Unions Do?, which devoted only two pages to unions’ influence on macroeconomic issues.

Productivity waves

The claim that high-income capitalist nations have experienced successive prolonged periods of amplified and dampened productivity growth is not contentious and nor is the fact that the rate of productivity growth is running well below its long-term average (Bergeaud et al Reference Bergeaud, Cette and Lecat2016) – see Figure 1 below for the US. What is contested is why these waves occur, why the great post-war wave ended, and why unions have been unable to sustain their share of the subsequent reduced productivity growth. Marxists generally argue that expansive waves ensued when the contingencies that counteract the tendency for the rate of profit to fall have a strong and synchronous effect. These factors may include significant improvements in management methods that enhance productivity without altering the magnitude of the invested capital (Basu et al Reference Basu, Huato, Jauregui and Wasner2025; Basu et al Reference Basu, Huato, Jauregui and Wasner2025; Kellner Reference Kellner2024; Marx Reference Marx1959, 165). Liberals, by contrast, are inclined to accord less attention to the profit rate and, rather, point to a combination of variables that are held to be explanatory (Goldin et al Reference Goldin, Koutroumpis, Lafond and Winkler2024, 196).

Figure 1. US Total Factor Productivity. Source: Gordon (Reference Gordon2016).

Marxists and liberals alike agree that, starting in the 1970s, governments and employers began establishing new laws and practices that curtailed workers’ bargaining power. As a consequence, wage earners’ share of the US GDP declined from 51% to 43% between 1970 and 2022. Both schools of thought accept, moreover, that long waves are caused by exogenous factors that may or may not be repeated. Within both traditions, however, a minority have been drawn to the findings of economist Nikolai Kondratiev, who held that waves of 50–60 years are endogenous, and consequently capitalism will inevitably recover from any sustained downturn. But with the passage of time and the failure of a new ‘Great Wave’ to emerge, even the limited number of scholars who have embraced Kondratiev’s deterministic version of wave theory has diminished. Kelly (Reference Kelly2018), who located the inevitability of new waves at the heart of his ‘rethinking of industrial relations’, for example, has conceded that the extant evidence has rendered the value of the theory at best an open question.

The contingencies that initiated and sustained the US long wave are also a topic of contention. Shackleton (Reference Shackleton2013) argues four clusters of innovation – electricity generation, internal-combustion engines, chemicals, and telecommunications – were critical, while Mokyr (Reference Mokyr1998) accepts a key contributor was the institutionalisation of technologies that enhanced the management of production and distribution. The latter’s perspective is accorded merit by Bloom et al (Reference Bloom, Sadun and Van Reenen2017, 2) who constructed a formal model of ‘Management as a Technology’ and found ‘differences in management practices account for about 30% of total factor productivity differences both between countries and within countries across firms.’ Also notable is the work of Dumenil and Levy (Reference Dumenil and Levy1993) who, after modelling for a range of independent variables that might explain the long productivity wave, concluded primary importance should be accorded the rise and subsequent exhaustion of the impetus to growth induced by:

Taylorism and trade unions

In the 1950s, two monographs documented the close working relationship that was forged between the scientific management and trade union movements during the interwar years (McKelvey Reference McKelvey1952; Nadworny Reference Nadworny1955). Over the following four decades, these works were augmented by labour historians who evinced that the Taylor Society actively supported unions, theorised the character of the firms that embraced the Taylorists’ mutual-gains agenda, and charged commentators who insist the scientific managers were hostile to unionism had commonly conflated Taylorism and Fordism (Nelson Reference Nelson1980). These works were largely ignored by management and industrial relations scholars, with the orthodoxy being exemplified by Johansson (Reference Johansson1986, 473) who observed:

In 1989 and 1998, Nyland contributed to the debate by arguing that a key element in the collaboration forged by the interwar scientific management movement and organised labour was the Taylorists’ support for reduced working hours and the institutionalisation of collaborative workplaces. He continued in Nyland et al (Reference Nyland, Bruce and Burns2014) documenting how Taylor’s acolytes worked to institutionalise the latter’s mutual-gains agenda in collaboration with the International Labour Organization, and, in 2018, Schachter joined the discussion with an insightful study of interwar labour representatives’ input to Taylor Society meetings (Schachter Reference Schachter2018).

In 2020, Kelly took the discourse in a new direction by artfully coining the term ‘Red Taylorism’ in her biography of Walter Polakov. The latter was a Marxist engineer, Taylor Society member, and an official of the Miners’ Union. Following Kelly’s lead, Davenport (Reference Davenport2023) underscored that Taylor became supportive of union participation in management processes and urged socialist labour militants and scholars to engage with these ideas. Responding to this call, Nyland (Reference Nyland2024) theorised why American socialists’ early response to scientific management was written from the history of organisation studies, while Mirsafian (Reference Mirsafian2023) documented how trade unions in post-WWII Sweden successfully pressured employers and the state to embrace the Taylorists’ mutual-gains and codetermination agenda. In 2025, Nyland further expanded the focus of the debate by reviewing the contribution feminist members of the Taylor Society made to the promotion of gender equity and trade unionism (Nyland Reference Nylandin press). Finally, Nyland and Bruce (Reference Nyland and Bruce2025) contested the long-held charge that the scientific managers’ outreach to organised labour began only after Taylor’s death and documented how the Taylor Society aided F.D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration strengthen union influence.

In this paper, we build on these contributions by demonstrating Taylor’s efforts to identify non-adversarial alternatives to wage bargaining; by explaining why members of the Taylor Society came to accept the need for strong unions to ensure wage rates could keep pace with national productivity and consumption growth, and by arguing that, through this shift, scientific managers aided a revival of trade union density and influence that persisted for decades and may offer lessons for trade union renewal today.

Taylor and collective bargaining

Taylor believed harmonious employment relations could be institutionalised by applying scientific analysis to production and distribution processes in ways that would generate substantial benefits for both employers and workers. His understanding of the capacity of science to generate mutual gains, however, was greater than what unions and some of his inner circle, were willing to accept. The concern experienced by the latter was exemplified by C.B. Thompson of the Harvard Business School, who criticised the limited role Taylor was willing to accord collective wage bargaining. That this form of barter was necessary, Thompson initially argued in a 1913 paper, he titled ‘The Relation of Scientific Management to the Wage Problem’, in which he challenged Taylor’s claim that his wage system was scientific.

Taylor applauded Thompson’s paper, challenging only his charge that he was anti-union. In reply, Thompson conceded most of the problems Taylor believed could be resolved by engaging the scientific method were best confronted in this manner, but insisted this was not true of the base wage.

By contesting the claim that Taylor’s wage-setting system was ‘scientific’, Thompson tested his oft-repeated assertion that if it could be shown collective bargaining was ‘needed, we should not hesitate to have it’ (Taylor to Hathaway – Taylor Papers, April 17, 1914). However, Taylor remained resolute in his determination to identify a non-adversarial system of wage setting. This arguably helps explain his reply, when subsequently he was asked by a Federal Industrial Relations Commissioner to explain how unionists and employers might resolve situations where they arrive at different conclusions after systematically and honestly analysing employment issues. Thus confronted, he advised that such situations should be resolved by according the courts an expanded role in identifying, developing, and institutionalising the laws governing the employment relationship.

Taylor’s discomfit was subsequently amplified when the jurist Felix Frankfurter told him that unions were bound to remain hostile to scientific management so long as employers alone hired and controlled the technicians who supposedly set wages scientifically (Nyland and Bruce Reference Nyland and Bruce2025). In reply, Taylor opined that this problem could be overcome by having scientific management technicians appointed jointly by the union and employer. While this solution was arguably technocratic, it was a radical proposition for the time and indeed would be accepted by very few current employers.

In 1914, Taylor publicly amplified his solution by calling on unions to educate their members in ways that would enable them to effectively participate in the management of their workplaces:

Taylor was aware that even workers who believed his claims of sympathy towards organised labour remained wary of his ideas. Notably, they feared that employers would gain enhanced power if they were able to increase their understanding of the labour process. Consequently, in 1915, he advised his friend and collaborator Morris Cooke that he had concluded discourse was insufficient, and that the scientific management and labour movements could be reconciled only if the technicians showed, rather than simply told, union leaders management science could be ‘good’ for their organisations (Taylor to Cooke – Taylor Papers 1915). This was a task taken up by Taylor’s acolytes following his sudden death some six weeks later.

Wages and productivity growth

Taylor was made a member of the Taylor Society in perpetuity on his death, with the position being immediately abolished so another could never share it. Concomitantly, Society members and fellow travellers began operationalising his advice that management theorists and practitioners needed to go beyond discourse and show their agenda could be ‘good’ for unions. This effort took multiple forms. An early initiative was actioned by Frankfurter, who took up the base wage problem. Expanding on Taylor’s advice that courts could help ameliorate the hostility commonly associated with collective bargaining, he invited Henry Bourne Higgins, the President of the Australian Commonwealth Court of Conciliation and Arbitration, to submit a contribution to the Harvard Law Review. This publication, titled ‘A New Province for Law and Order: Industrial Peace Through Minimum Wage and Arbitration’, detailed how Higgins’ Court set the base wage by empirically determining the facts pertaining to the cost of living in a ‘civilised community’ (Higgins Reference Higgins1915). Charged by this revelation, in 1916, Henry Rogers Seager, the Secretary of the Shipbuilding Labor Adjustment Board and a Taylor Society member, mandated that henceforth employers and unions would be required to provide robust factual evidence when assisting the Board in arbitrating on wages.

At the commemoration of Taylor’s untimely demise, Justice Louis Brandeis (Reference Brandeis1915) urged the scientific managers to engage Taylor’s advice that they show and not merely tell unions that scientific management could be good for them. Expanding, he added that they should ensure that this was done before introducing workplace reforms. Brandeis was respected by Society members, not least because he had actively supported Taylor’s efforts to combat the influence of engineers who subordinated their professional ethics in the service of corporate power (Layton Reference Layton1971; Nyland 2025). Responding to his call, members initiated a debate on the respective roles of the manager, the social scientist, and the worker in the governance of organisations (Person Reference Person1917). This debate quickly morphed into a discussion of who should speak for the worker, with members divided over whether independent or company unions were preferred and how negotiations should be conducted.

Engaging the wage question, Ordway Tead and Robert Valentine (Reference Tead and Valentine1917) argued that irrespective of whether bargaining is undertaken by employers and employees alone or involves an external arbitrator, it must not be presumed that base rates equal standard rates in the district or are some percentage more than such rate. To embrace this assumption, is, they charged, ‘to throw away the case so far as any claim to scientific division of earnings goes’ (Tead and Valentine Reference Tead and Valentine1917, 247–248). Rather, a scientific approach requires that the interested parties ‘thrash matters out’ with all financial and technical facts fully before them, meaning firms must ‘open their books’ and provide workers with knowledge of the true costs of production, distribution, and many other issues characteristically deemed confidential.

With US entry into WWI, the Taylorists’ capacity to show scientific management could be good for unions was enhanced when Frankfurter was appointed the Chair of the War Labour Policies Board. Capitalising on this opportunity, he subsequently assigned Morris Cooke to a managerial position that enabled him to abolish child labour, institutionalise the eight-hour day, and establish joint-production committees in organisations providing the needs of war (McKelvey Reference McKelvey1952; Nadworny Reference Nadworny1955; Nyland 2025). This effort greatly impressed Samuel Gompers, the President of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), who, at war’s end, employed Cooke as his technical advisor when attending the first meeting of the International Labour Organization. Together, the two men subsequently edited an edition of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science that explored the management functions that organised labour might undertake if union leaders accepted they had to share responsibility for enterprise efficiency.

The Gompers-Cooke text stressed the need for cooperation between the ‘scientists of industry and the representatives of organized workers [and insisted] where the pursuit of profits makes for waste rather than for the conservation of human and mechanical energy readjustments are inevitable and may be radical’ (Cooke 1920, VII–VIII). Concomitantly, the Society initiated a series of studies designed to show scientific management could be good for unions by providing organised labour with technical knowledge that aided their efforts to reduce working hours and demonstrate that poor management and not worker militancy was the single greatest source of waste in industry (McKelvey Reference McKelvey1952; Nadworny Reference Nadworny1955; Nyland Reference Nyland1989).

Contra Braverman’s (Reference Braverman1974) charge that the Taylorists wished to have workplace knowledge monopolised by the employer, the Taylor Society assisted the American Federation of Labor establish management research and education centres. Informing the governance of these institutions was the conviction that if unionists were to be active participants in management, they had to have access to the knowledge required to undertake this function. The Taylorists’ understanding was captured by Cooke when he advised Sidney Hillman, the socialist President of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union, that he believed:

The budding collaboration between organised labour and scientific managers was tested, however, when the 1920–1921 Depression led employers to argue wages should be cut because prices had fallen and launched an assault on organised labour that devastated union numbers.

With the collapse in union density (see Figure 2 below), the AFL and Taylor Society sought to promote union renewal by showing firms how unions that embraced management science could generate gains for both employers and workers. Their promotion of the mutual-gains message, however, was not well received by employers. Seeking to render their case more scientific, the Taylorists urged the federal government to construct an index of national labour productivity that would assist wage-earners to gain their ‘proper share’ of productivity growth. In 1926, the Department of Labour took up this proposal and began publishing a series of articles that revealed the US was undergoing what it deemed was nothing less than a Second Industrial Revolution. Indeed, ‘perhaps the most remarkable advance in productive efficiency in the history of the modern industrial system’ (cited by Tugwell Reference Tugwell1927, 3).

Figure 2. Historical Statistics of the United States (1976), Series D-940 and Series D-7. Source: US Bureau of the Census (1976).

Responding to the Department’s finding, Rexford Tugwell argued that the increase in industrial efficiency was due primarily to improved management technologies; further the Marxist economist Jurgen Kuczynski, who was chief statistician for the AFL, evinced that wages growth was not matching the rate of productivity increase, and hence, the wage share of the national income was declining (Linder Reference Linder1994). Concerned at Kuczynski’s finding, the Taylor Society invited the new AFL President to join a debate on how employers’ capacity to ‘hog’ the benefits of productivity growth could be countervailed (Green Reference Green1928). The industrialist Henry Williams (1928, 12) captured the essence of the debate when he lamented that, despite advances in macroeconomic stabilisation theory and statistical analysis, two contingencies made it extremely difficult to convince employers that it was necessary to address the fact that workers’ income was lagging behind technological advances. First, property owners and their administrators overwhelmingly believed that if wages were raised, their own earnings were bound to be reduced even if the community’s consuming capacity was increased. Second, trade unions lacked the bargaining power required to compel employer and government stakeholders to accord workers a commensurate share of the benefits made possible by increased productivity (Williams Reference Williams1928, 11).

The Taylor Society debated the issues underscored by Williams at its 1928 conference, with Morris Cooke opening the discussion by arguing that a truly scientific approach to wage management and union renewal required that workers have the capacity to countervail employer power to a degree sufficient to render collective bargaining meaningful:

Expanding, Cooke insisted, effective wage bargaining requires independent, national trade unions that can fund the training union members needed to participate effectively in the management process and to demonstrate to employers that management science could generate substantial mutual gains. More specifically, he called on the membership to consider:

As the US plummeted into the Great Depression, it became clear that President Hoover would not use state power to ensure that wage and productivity growth were harmonised. Consequently, Society members became convinced that the function unions could and must undertake was to act as managers of aggregate demand. In arriving at this position, the Society undertook an ongoing debate which at times was acrimonious. This was not least because some contributors charged that the scientific managers were in part to blame for the crisis. For in working to increase productivity, the scientific managers had not adequately addressed what might occur if society’s capacity to generate output was not matched by its capacity to consume. The charge was well articulated by Tugwell, who was soon after appointed one of President FD Roosevelt’s four-man Brains Trust (Tugwell Reference Tugwell1932, 86, Reference Tugwell1968).

Accepting this criticism, Mary van Kleeck, a Marxist and the first woman to join the Taylor Society, urged its members to accept that the Depression was due to workers’ lack of adequate consuming power and that the scientific managers had to address this problem:

Taylor Society members subsequently debated the underconsumption charge and by 1933, the leadership was willing to publish Figure 3 below (Welch Reference Welch1933, 13).

Figure 3. Indexes of Capital Returns, Capital Expansion and Labor Returns United States. Source: Welch (Reference Welch1933).

Welch’s contribution was a forerunner to the great body of literature that has analysed the cause, course, and consequences of the 1930s Depression. This literature has been dominated by political scientists and economists with both traditions being inclined to overstate the significance of their respective discipline, and/or the stream of thought within their field with which they align. Irrespective of their orientation, however, few contributors have considered the role that management and organisation researchers, and more specifically the Taylor Society, made to deliberating strategies for dealing with the Depression. Significant exceptions to the latter observation exist, but they are rare, being limited to Friedlander’s (Reference Friedlander1987) The Origins of the Welfare State: The Keynesian Elite and the Second New Deal, Fraser’s (Reference Fraser, Fraser and Gerstle1989) The Labor Question, and Pabon’s (Reference Pabon1992) Regulating Capitalism: The Taylor Society and Political Economy in the Interwar Period.

The omission of any substantial discussion of the contribution that management scholars and practitioners made to constructing and governing the New Deal, moreover, has attracted little attention from contemporary researchers in management and organisation studies. This is despite the fact that through the Depression years, US firms experienced what Field (Reference Field2011) describes as a ‘Great Leap Forward’ in productivity growth by diffusing innovations in technology and infrastructure that had been developed in the 1920s. Why management scholars have not addressed this issue has been discussed by Foster, Mills and Weatherbee (Reference Foster, Mills and Weatherbee2014), who posit the omission is because organisation studies has been captured by corporate interests which believe Roosevelt’s New Deal assault on business power was reprehensible and not an agenda that could be allowed to be repeated, and so, preferably not researched or taught in business schools.

Foster et al. (Reference Foster, Mills and Weatherbee2014) contribution is valuable but is diminished by the lack of attention they accord what they term ‘verifiable facts’ that have been judged through a process of ‘reasonable inferences’. Consequently, they posit that the problems and challenges of the Depression years were ‘perceived by management scholars to be separated from management; they were affairs of government, albeit a government whose growing role in regulating industry was neither welcome nor willingly acknowledged.’ This charge suggests these scholars were unaware of the historical literature that has documented the theoretical contribution made by Taylor Society members who left their universities and firms, and worked to show that the New Deal administration could enhance the power and well-being of the dispossessed.

That Taylor Society members played a substantial role in the New Deal was initially evinced by Friedlander (Reference Friedlander1987). Drawing on the Society’s 1936 membership list, he showed that a substantial number of practitioner and academic members joined Roosevelt’s administration. They did so, not merely as consultants or providers of executive education, but as senior managers of key agencies of the regulatory state the federal government was constructing to contain the power of corporate monopolies. By so doing, he was able to show that a three-stage hierarchy existed within the state: this being the executive, the secondary leadership, and one or more Frankfurter lawyers and several Taylor Society technocrats. Also noteworthy is that the Taylorists’ presence was subsequently expanded to include notable Society members such as Marshall Dimock (Reference Dimock1939), who was appointed Francis Perkins’ Assistant Secretary of Labour in 1938 (while concomitantly President of the Washington chapter of the Taylor Society), and Raymond Zimmerman who became Administrative Assistant to President Truman (while concurrently National President of the Taylor Society).

Once ensconced within the New Deal administration, Taylor Society members worked to harmonise production and consumption. They did so, not least by assisting the crafting of labour and social security legislation that enhanced workers’ ability to unionise and limited employers’ freedom to engage whatever labour management regime they preferred. Notably, Barenberg (Reference Barenberg1993) observes, Society members made a significant contribution to drafting Robert Wagner’s 1935 National Labor Relations Act, at the heart of which was Wagner’s conviction that:

In Pabon’s (Reference Pabon1992) pioneering study of the Taylor Society, he characterised the demand management aspect of the scientific managers’ agenda as ‘proto-Keynesians’. This depiction has some validity in that Keynes did come to concede the Taylorists’ conviction that labour markets do not necessarily clear if left to themselves. However, what Pabon misses is that the Taylorists were not Keynesians in the sense of focusing on government expenditure to stabilise the economy. Rather, as Jacobs (Reference Jacobs2005) underscores, they tended to be ‘fiscal conservatives’ who emphasised the impact of social, political, and legal institutions on economic outcomes. Notably, they sought to increase the capacity of labour market institutions including trade unions, to keep demand and supply in equilibrium.

Keynes, it is true, did accept that unions could function as managers of aggregate demand. However, he preferred that this task be undertaken by the state because he believed unions could only equilibrate production and consumption ‘by a series of gradual, irregular changes, justifiable on no criterion of social justice or economic expedience, and probably completed only after wasteful and disastrous struggles, where those in the weakest bargaining position will suffer relatively to the rest’ (Keynes Reference Keynes2018, 236). Moreover, Keynes failed to address the possibility that unions might be compelled to become primary managers of market stabilisation should the state not undertake this function. Disastrously, this possibility was rendered manifest in 1937 when President Roosevelt surrendered to demands that he balance the national budget and reduced state expenditure, and so saw unemployment leap from 11% to 20% over the following year.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that John Kenneth Galbraith (Reference Galbraith1981) advises that Keynes’ work had a dramatic impact on his understanding of economics. Nonetheless, Galbraith also reports that when the General Theory appeared, he was living in the home of a one-time president of the Taylor Society, and that his host’s circle viewed Keynes’ contribution as a confirmation of economic principles they had long been helping US policymakers to institutionalise.

As part of their effort to show that management science could be ‘good’ for unions, Society members also helped build the Congress of Industrial Organisations (CIO). Exemplifying this effort, in 1940, Morris Cooke authored a monograph jointly with Phillip Murray, the President of the United Steelworkers’ Union, which called on US employers and unions to ‘tap labor’s brain’ by embracing management codetermination (Cooke and Murray Reference Cooke and Murray1940, 121). Following this development, influential trade union officials joined the Taylor Society, including Clinton Golden (Reference Golden and Ruttenberg1942) of the steelworkers’ union, who, in 1942, published a joint monograph with Harold Ruttenberg titled The Dynamics of Industrial Democracy, which was explicit in denying employers a unilateral right to set rather than negotiate wage rates.

The Taylorist-union effort was further expanded through WWII with the scientific managers assisting the state, employers, and trade unions establish participatory production management structures in some 3500 enterprises (Lever and Goodell Reference Lever and Goodell1948). This was done under the watchful eye of Harry S. Truman’s Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defence Programme. Through the war years, Truman resisted employer complaints that unions were encroaching on property owners ‘Right to Manage’. Moreover, he called on the Taylor Society to assist the eventual transition to peace, and in 1944, he welcomed the Society’s decision to make the theme of its annual conference ‘Management Factors for Full Employment’ (Truman Reference Truman1944, Reference Truman1945).

The full-employment conference centred on the relationship between productivity, wages, profits, and participatory management. Discussion was led by academics and trade union officials. Lloyd G. Reynolds (Reference Reynolds1946) of Yale opened the debate with a contribution that stressed that both workers and employers should share responsibility for ensuring that wages and productivity growth are closely linked. Optimistically, he expanded that there was growing acceptance that it was necessary to share responsibility for balancing wages and productivity, and that this would eventually lead unions and corporations to forge a wage system that could support full employment. By contrast, Wharton’s Balderston (Reference Balderston1946) focused on the cost of production, and so argued that firms could provide wage increases that were not inflationary if senior management directed increased attention to capacity utilisation. This perspective was echoed by Solomon Barkin (Reference Barkin1946) of the Textile Workers of America, who argued wages should be raised to increase effective demand, which in turn, would enable firms to absorb wage rises by increasing their capacity utilisation. Finally, Clinton Golden (Reference Golden1946) argued the path to increased prosperity for all was codetermination with workers, unions, and enterprise managers participating in production committees and sharing knowledge and responsibility for all aspects of management.

Reynolds identified General Motors (GM) and the United Automobile Workers (UAW) as the agents that might establish how employer monopsony and union monopoly power could be balanced in a full-employment, high-wage, and profit economy. This advice reflected his awareness that GM and the UAW were in the midst of a major industrial dispute that centred on wages, and more importantly, on the so-called ‘prerogatives of management’. In brief, the union demanded a wage rise, a guarantee there would be no subsequent rise in prices that would undermine the wage increase, and an ‘opening of the books’ of the company to enable both parties to become aware of production costs, investment plans, the impact of wage increases on profits, and so on.

The Taylor Society made clear its sympathy for the UAW’s agenda. The strike itself lasted for 113 days and involved 300,000 workers. But with the assistance of other corporations, GM swept away the notion that its pricing policy and production-technical decision-making were subjects for bargaining or arbitration. Consequently, the union and its scientific management supporters’ hope that the dispute would entail a debate amongst actors, all of whom would have access to scientific knowledge relating to costs, pricing, and the like, was thwarted, and the strikers starved back to work. As Harris (Reference Harris1982, 150) has observed

Harris’ (Reference Harris1982) reporting is accurate, though he appears unaware of the extent to which the scientific managers strove to assist the UAW to limit the ability of GM to set wages by providing the union with data they hoped would turn the management of wage determination into a scientific endeavour. In 1951, the transition to the post-war order was confirmed when the AFL adopted what it termed ‘A New Wage Policy to Prevent Crisis’. This accepted the employers’ offer to tie wage growth to increases in ‘efficient production’ so long as all issues relating to management beyond wages and conditions of employment were conceded to be the prerogative of the employer.