Industrial Relations and Uneven Development: Wage Structure and Industrial Organization in the British and U.S. Iron and Steel Industries 1870-1970

摘要

The study is principally concerned with two interrelated aspects of British and U.S. iron and steel industry development, namely with long persistent disparities in wage structure and in industrial structure and performance. The origins of these disparities are traced to a critical formative period before W.W.I, which is accordingly the main period of enquiry. The argument presented links disparity in wage structure to a distinctive trade union impact which reflected and had a reciprocal influence upon, divergent industrial organization. In either country, exclusive unions of strategic process workers were able to maintain downwardly rigid tonnage wage rates, and thereby capture, plant-by-plant, a portion of the benefits of technical change and increasing productivity. But in the U.S., trade union organization met with defeat, while in Britain, union organization was consolidated under a two-tiered structure of bargaining. Union defeat in the U.S. came at the hands of oligopolistic, multi-plant firms. Union success with two-tiered bargaining in Britain was facilitated by comparative industrial fragmentation.