The Managerial Revolution in Industrial Relations in the Progressive Era : The Labor Reform Movement in the Several Industrial Enterprises in the Chicago Area

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This research project aims to understand how the labor management strategy and its structure of the modern industrial enterprises had been formed the two decades of the early twentieth century in the United States.Early 1920's most of the larger industrial corporations that combined a wide geographical range with a broad range of industrial corporations that combined a wide geographical range with a broad range of industrial products had a centralized labor bureaus commonly known as the industrial relations department, with a trained manager in charge corresponding to the managers in charge of sales, production, and other main functions of corporation's head office. The industrial relations department was established for the need of a comprehensive policy dealing with all labor relations to coordinate all of various industrial betterment activities of the every local works. To carry out this coordination, the manager of industrial relations criticized the professional standards of the war-time liberal thoughts of employment management. He endeavored to secure the cooperation among the local works personnel forces and between them and line production managers as well as the coordination of the relationship between employer and employee.Main programs directed through the industrial relations department were the employee representation plan and the foremen's training, both of which were traceable to various systems of committee management. The committee management was invented by progressive mechanical engineers to establish"teamwork" on the shop floor, and then it was applied to accident prevention activities by safety managers. The philosophy of committee management was based on the principle that the good will and cooperative spirit of the workers is a valuable asset. But industrial relations managers realized that the excessive enhancement of sharing in the management did not make for the kind of efficiency that was necessary for modern mass production.