LARRY G. GERBER. The Irony of State Intervention: American Industrial Relations Policy in Comparative Perspective, 1914-1939. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. 2005. Pp. vii, 212. $40.00

Abstract

The “irony” in the title of Larry G. Gerber's stimulating book refers to the passage of the Wagner (National Labor Relations) Act of 1935. How did it happen, Gerber asks, that laissez-faire America opted for so intrusive a state intervention into its industrial relations regime? Such an action, Gerber adds, “would have been inconceivable during the same period in Britain,” America's companion in “having a ‘weak state’” (p. 3). The comparative history that proceeds from these observations goes in two directions. On one axis Gerber posits three levels of industrial relations activity/policy: macro (national); meso (industrywide); and micro (firm or plant level). On a second, temporal axis he posits two nodes around which activity/policy cluster. One he calls, following Otto Kahn-Freund, “collectivist laissez faire,” in which “the state is largely a referee between organized workers and employers who must still compete in the marketplace”; the other, in a variety of guises, corporatism, in which “organized interests cooperate with the state to produce outcomes designed to serve the public interest” (p. 8). The premise of Gerber's book is that this particular analytical frame, applied comparatively, will yield an answer to the remarkable divergence of national labor policies in 1935.