AP Images
John Dunlop (right), Gerald Ford’s secretary of labor from 1975 to 1976, is seen here resigning, after Ford withdrew support from a construction site picketing bill.
More Worlds to Negotiate: John Dunlop and the Art of Problem Solving
By Jennifer C. Berkshire
Hamilton Books
Ever since the pandemic gripped the nation, the mobilization experience during World War II has been celebrated as the model we need to fight this brutally disruptive invader. Prioritize and channel essential medical supplies and personnel, mobilize production, sustain worker incomes, and safeguard working conditions with a gigantic burst of federal spending and a new era of economic and social regulation; then wind it all down—“reconversion” was the wartime word—with careful planning and much government supervision.
But one idea from that era has been conspicuously absent: the idea that all this governmental activity and economic regulation should be coordinated through corporatist institutions involving labor, management, and the state. “Tripartite” was the wartime word for a collaborative structure to harmoniously ameliorate social and economic conflict and command popular legitimacy in a world demanding sacrifice, compromise, and substantial governmental regulation.
John Dunlop, the noted labor economist and mediator, was a product of that world, a scholar/practitioner who came of academic age in the Great Depression and formed his views about labor, management, and the state during his three years on the War Labor Board. That tripartite institution was crucial to a 50 percent increase in the size of the labor movement during World War II, but also to the containment of the economic and political demands of industrial unions made powerful and aggressive by a working class bursting with vitality and self-confidence. This was a delicate balancing act, especially given managerial hostility to the growth of labor power and government regulation. So, Dunlop’s generation of mediators and arbitrators were in high demand—young, practically minded economists and lawyers, dedicated to amelioration and routinization of class antagonism in the midst of a titanic world conflict.
Journalist Jennifer Berkshire does not dwell on Dunlop’s wartime career in her admirable and well-sourced study of how Dunlop sought to resolve a whole series of conflicts, ranging from the police bust of Harvard student radicals in 1969 to the Clinton-era effort to reconstruct industrial relations in the 1990s. But it’s clear that the template devised in the late New Deal and World War II proved an enduring influence on Dunlop-style problem solving.
Dunlop, who spent his entire postwar career at Harvard, remained intensely hostile to any overt ideological schema, preferring a grounded pragmatism. Thus, when Dunlop faced a problem in policy formulation or at the workplace, he first sought to construct what he called a “mechanism,” echoing the tripartite arrangements of the war years, and would then bring the key figures to the table, find their true bottom line, and hammer out a compromise, lubricated perhaps with a few late-night drinks at one of Dunlop’s favorite Cambridge or D.C. bars. “The important thing is to express and channel conflict in ways that get the problems dealt with in a constructive manner,” Dunlop told an interviewer shortly before his death in 2003.
Unfortunately, Dunlop and others from the War Labor Board generation came to fetishize this supposedly anti-ideological operational practicality; and above all the idea that trade unionism was actually functional to modern capitalism. This premise was derived from both the sociology of Talcott Parsons and the temporary reality of a powerful labor movement. This mindset was a key element Dunlop put forward in his most important scholarly work, Industrial Relations Systems, published in 1958, and it reappears in the 1960 book he co-authored with Clark Kerr, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers—all WLB veterans—Industrialism and Industrial Man.
In both works, Dunlop avoided use of the word “capitalism,” a concept then heavily freighted with a leftist meaning, substituting instead “industrialism.” The net result was to give the industrial-relations scholarship of that era a static, technocratic quality, which would increasingly blind Dunlop to the transformations taking place in American economic and political life. Thus in 1982, when it was apparent that American politics had lurched to the right, that the U.S. version of capitalism was undergoing a radical transformation, and that President Ronald Reagan’s destruction of PATCO had opened the door to a far more intransigent era of corporate anti-unionism, Dunlop told a Business Week reporter, “It is not a new era and I’ll put my name on it.”
One did not have to wait until the 1980s to recognize the limitations of that kind of thinking. Thirty-five years before, when Dunlop came up for tenure at Harvard, the Economics Department was, with one exception, entirely behind him. In 1945, after all, the need for industrial-relations scholars seemed obvious. But Joseph Schumpeter, of all people, favored another candidate, Paul Sweezy, an untenured Harvard Marxist who had already published a couple of books charting monopolistic trends in capitalist development. Schumpeter was a social and political conservative, but he famously recognized that capitalism was a system that was, well, creative and destructive, and all too capable of adapting to resist even the most powerful trade union movement. Sweezy’s life work would probe that trajectory; Dunlop’s did not.
Dunlop, who spent his entire postwar career at Harvard, remained intensely hostile to any overt ideological schema, preferring a grounded pragmatism.
Berkshire is well aware of these Dunlopian blinders. At one point, she calls his dispute resolution method “almost quaint,” and Dunlop the “creature of a bygone era.” Nevertheless she writes that “Dunlop’s approach to helping workers remains an inspiration and a model.” And Dunlop did accomplish a lot. He was a resourceful mediator, genuinely at ease with plumbers, farmworkers, and clerical workers as well as CEOs and senators. His method was “tireless behind-the-scenes maneuvering,” reports Berkshire; he bridled at the insistence that everything in government needed to be done “under the full blast of publicity and in public.”
This Dunlop method worked best when applied to conflicts that took place in one well-understood institution or industry; it proved a failure when launched upon the national scene, especially as labor’s adversaries became relentless in the politically polarized era from the 1970s onward.
At Harvard, Dunlop’s influence was organically powerful. Although he grew alienated from the Economics Department, he cherished the larger institution, rising to Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in the early 1970s. That promotion was surely helped along by his deft handling of the 1969 occupation of University Hall, when the police rousted some 170 protesting students. Although Dunlop had no sympathy with student radicalism, he assembled a carefully balanced committee that marginalized neoconservative hawks like James Q. Wilson and sidelined Harvard’s insular president, Nathan Pusey. Discussions dragged on, tempers cooled, and once a Cambridge municipal court had its disciplinary say, Dunlop orchestrated a set of university penalties that avoided outright expulsion of any of the students.
Two decades later, Dunlop proved an equally adept interlocutor when the university faced a unionizing drive among technical and clerical workers led by Kris Rondeau, a tireless, charismatic organizer spawned by the New Left and the new feminism. By this time, Derek Bok, a close Dunlop friend and an industrial-relations scholar in his own right, was Harvard’s president. But neither Bok’s position nor his pedigree tempered Harvard’s hostility to the union, even after the National Labor Relations Board ruled that the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers had won a narrow majority of eligible votes in a 1988 certification election.
This was the Reagan era, and Harvard had hired an anti-union law firm that specialized in obfuscation, delay, and grinding resistance. During HUCTW’s nearly decade-long organizing effort, Dunlop had offered no recorded support. But recalling the bitter conflict that had long engulfed Yale University’s relationship with its employees, he remembered Rondeau, who developed with him a warm friendship. He put Rondeau in direct contact with Bok and helped persuade the university president to ignore his lawyers and recognize the union. Bok then made Dunlop Harvard’s chief negotiator. A long and complex negotiating process, reflecting the feminist and participatory character of the union, culminated in a progressive, innovative contract ratified by 94 percent of the HUCTW membership. “He was a modern man,” concluded Rondeau. “The bowtie was deceiving.”
Dunlop was equally adept at resolving conflicts well beyond Harvard Square. In northwest Ohio, Dunlop created a negotiating mechanism that helped the farmworkers who picked the tomatoes and cucumbers that large firms like Campbell Soup purchased from independent growers. The latter were the farmworkers’ legally recognized employers, so the trick was to make the deep-pocket firm at the top of the agricultural supply chain actually negotiate with those workers. Dunlop got involved in 1985 after Baldemar Velásquez and his Farm Labor Organizing Committee had spent nearly a decade shaming and boycotting the big food-processing company. When a Campbell executive asked Dunlop how much he charged, the Harvard professor tartly replied, “I’m not a consultant.” True enough, but Campbell was willing to entertain Dunlop’s mediation efforts only because it faced a public-relations disaster.
Although farmworkers were not covered by the Wagner Act, Dunlop helped Velásquez and Campbell agree to establish a mechanism, soon dubbed the Dunlop Commission, under whose tutelage a three-way contract between the FLOC, the farmers, and the soup company was negotiated. The commission lasted for decades and in 2004 even extended its reach to North Carolina, where it brokered another three-way contract between FLOC, the Mt. Olive Pickle company, and a grower’s association.
Dunlop “refused to see the decline in labor’s fortunes as indicative of some tectonic shift.”
Dunlop knew all the players in Washington—he’d headed President Richard Nixon’s Cost of Living Council in the early 1970s—but there his deal making proved a telling failure. President Jerry Ford appointed him labor secretary in 1975, for one major reason: to push through Congress the common situs picketing bill that Dunlop had painstakingly worked out among the construction trades, the AFL-CIO, big contractors, and congressional Democrats, who now commanded post-Watergate majorities in Congress. Ford saw the law as a partial solution to stagflation, as well as an electoral stratagem by which the Republicans could consolidate support among hard-hat tradesmen whose cultural conservatism made them potential GOP voters.
The new law would enable a union to picket an entire construction site, heretofore illegal under Taft-Hartley, but essential to union bargaining power and institutional security on the giant construction projects that were still being built with union labor. In return, power within the building trades would be centralized, thus enabling top union leaders and industry executives to work out a wage-restraint policy for an entire trade. Strikes would be less frequent and wage advances moderate but more predictable. This was tripartism par excellence.
This neat corporatist deal came a cropper when employers and an increasingly conservative faction within the GOP took a good look at it. Both the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce were opposed, likewise the growing cohort of construction firms that were building with non-union labor. Even more important, the GOP was shifting to the right, with Ronald Reagan challenging Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. Both houses of Congress passed the common situs bill, but Arizona’s Paul Fannin spoke for an aggrieved conservatism when he charged that if Ford signed it, “Millions of dollars more will pour into the union treasuries, money that will be spent to defeat any free enterprise candidate who dares to stand up against union bosses’ demands.” Ford knew his nomination as the GOP standard-bearer was on the line. After he told Dunlop he would veto the bill, the labor secretary felt “double-crossed” by a president whose “internal moral quality” could not be trusted. Dunlop soon resigned, just ten months into his tenure.
Such a principled resignation is both rare and admirable, but the experience did not shake Dunlop’s core beliefs. “He refused to see the decline in labor’s fortunes as indicative of some tectonic shift,” writes Berkshire. Again in the Carter administration, he chaired a semi-official Labor-Management Group that imploded after its corporate members, many heading firms that had long operated with a unionized workforce, opposed yet another Democratic effort at incremental labor law reform. That prompted Douglas Fraser, a former UAW president, to charge capital with waging a “one-sided class war” in his letter of resignation.
A decade and a half later, Labor Secretary Robert Reich persuaded President Bill Clinton to set up a new committee to consider how labor law reform might encourage more “high performance” workplaces. Once again, Dunlop was the indispensable man, in spite of—well, perhaps because of—his continuing illusion that some legislative accommodation could yet be worked out between labor and capital.
This new Dunlop Commission uncovered a hidden world of workplace dysfunction. There were 21 public hearings at which 411 witnesses had their say. The key issue was revision of the Wagner Act’s Section 8(a)(2) that banned company-dominated unions, in return for which the unions hoped some corporate anti-union practices might be ended and organizing made easier. Dunlop wanted to permit non-union companies to set up employee involvement schemes. He told AFL leaders, “This is the way we rebuild the labor movement.”
It was true that in the 1930s some company unions, in the steel and electrical industries especially, did provide a launching pad for authentic trade unions, when militants exerted sufficient influence. But in the late 20th century, this sort of transformation seemed unlikely given the rise of corporate anti-unionism and an aggressive union avoidance bar. The management members of the Dunlop Commission were unwilling to make any concessions when it came to changing the law to facilitate union organizing. As Tom Kochan, a commission member and MIT industrial-relations scholar, told Berkshire of the last big labor-management accommodation Dunlop sought to arrange: “There was no deal, and there still is no deal.”
