Book Review: Labor and Employment Law: Arbitrating Race, Religion, and National Origin Discrimination Grievances

ever, is ultimately quite scant. A subtly but importantly different possible explanation of the slower productivity growth is that it primarily stemmed from shopfloor disruption caused by labor-management conflict accompanying the intense organizing activity of the time. For some 15 years after World War II, workers successfully engaged in strategic use of shopfloor tactics, through what came to be known as "fractional bargaining. " Employers responded by trying to enlist union leaders and, ultimately, the process of collective bargaining itself in a struggle to regain and solidify their managerial prerogatives. Fairris argues that the contractual codification of plant-level rights and responsibilities ("shopfloor contractualism") reined in the power of industrial work groups. To support that argument, he trieswith, I believe, considerable but not complete success-to identify links between apparent changes in that power and his general indicators of shopfloor outcomes. Briefly, Fairris argues that declining and then rising injury rates in manufacturing corresponded to a rise and subsequent decline in the power of informally constituted workgroups. A parallel argument regarding swings in productivity growth rates raises some analytical ambiguities, however. Fairris wants to make the case, it seems, that work groups' power to control the pace of production under "fractional bargaining" was mitigated in its impact on productivity growth by the cooperative "flexibility" that it also entailed. Yet his empirical results suggest that the productivity payoffs from eliminating fractional bargaining were largest where its practice had been most fully developed. Furthermore, when Fairris finds that the late1960s productivity slowdown was most severe in industries where workers' fractional bargaining power had been greatest during the previous decade, he attributes that phenomenon not to workers' reemergent power to reduce their labor effort, but rather to the efficiency-choking fallout of inchoate worker despair brought about by shopfloor contractualism, which deprived them of control over their working lives. This interpretation, though not implausible, weakens the evidentiary value of productivity change as a measure of shopfloor outcomes. And to my mind it is less than certain that manufacturing workers' shopfloor militancy in the 1960s differed fundamentally from their shopfloor militancy in the 1950s. "Lean production," Fairris maintains, is aimed at recapturing the productivity-enhancing value of the decentralized and flexible shopfloor decision making that characterized fractional bargaining. The trick for employers is to build the managerial legitimacy needed to enact cooperative shopfloor policies without opening the door to reconstituted industrial work groups. So far, employers seem to have pulled it off: Fairris finds that markers of "lean production" are associated with modestly increased labor productivity and worsened workplace health. The implication that shopfloor conditions have recently deteriorated for American production workers may disturb those enamored of the virtues of the "cooperative workplace. " Whether one agrees with all its author's interpretations is not a proper measure of the value of Shopfloor Matters. This book is rich in analytical scope, creativity, and insight. It deserves to be read and pondered by any serious student of American shopfloor relations.