Hired Hands or Human Resources? Case Studies of HRM Programs and Practices in Early American Industry

Abstract

This is the second book of a two-volume set. In the first volume, Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource Management in American Industry (2008), Bruce E. Kaufman told the story of the forces—such as scientific management and the labor movement—and figures—such as Frederick Winslow Taylor and Samuel Gompers—that transformed employee relations for better or worse in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This new book presents fifteen detailed case studies that show how companies either conceived of employees as “hired hands” or opted for a more holistic style of human relations management (HRM), the altruism of which Kaufman sensibly refuses to overestimate. The case studies offer fresh and interesting material on employee relations at such well-known firms as Ford Motor Company, United States Steel Corporation, and Pullman Palace Car Company. Also commendable are Kaufman's case studies drawn from the work of Industrial Relations Counselors (IRC), the consulting firm that was founded by John D. Rockefeller Jr. after the 1914 Ludlow massacre, in which workers, women, and children were murdered during a Colorado strike against his family's mining interests. The IRC aimed to save top management from being blindsided by frontline managers’ malfeasance in labor relations, which was what Rockefeller believed had happened at Ludlow. Legal restrictions prevented Kaufman from naming the companies in the IRC reports, rendering the cases a bit lifeless. But the fact that the IRC filed hundreds of such reports suggests how large—and easily underestimated—was corporate America's pre–Great Depression investment in “welfare capitalism” (p. 115).