This is a study of British industrial relations during the period 1914-1939, written by leading authorities in the field. The text provides a detailed analysis of industrial relations during World War I, followed by essays on selected themes and individual case studies for the inter-war period.

A history of British industrial relations from 1939 to the beginning of Thatcher's 1979 administration, surveying the complexity of British industrial relations and its affect on the British economy. The eight contributing scholars discuss topics in labor and law, trade union development, management, social welfare, and strikes in the post World War II era. Additionally, three case studies highlight industrial relations in the docks, in the automobile industry, and in road haulage from 1945 to 1979. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

History and Heritage (1985) offers the first comprehensive exploration and assessment of the historical developments that form Britain’s industrial relations system – its institutions, texture and place in wider society. It looks at pre-industrial patterns of thought and behaviour, at religious and political struggles, different strategies of rule and social control, and at the central significance of the ruling order’s conditional commitment to the rule of law and certain liberal freedoms.

Embracing individualism and antistatism, the United States traditionally has favored a limited role for government. Yet state intervention both against and on behalf of labor has a long history, culminating in the labor law reforms of the New Deal. How do we account for this irony? And how do we explain why, between World War I and the Great Depression, another leading industrial nation with similar ideological commitments, Great Britain, developed a different model? By comparing the United States and Britain, Larry G. Gerber makes clear that, in the development of industrial relations policies, ideology was secondary to economic realities--the structure of business, the market system, and the configuration of unions. Nonetheless, industrial policy developed within the broader context of the transition from the individualistic laissez-faire capitalism of the nineteenth century to a collectivist political economy in which the state and organized groups played increasingly important roles while pluralist and corporatist models contended for influence. In Britain, where most business enterprises remained comparatively small, collective bargaining between workers and management became the norm. In the United States, however, large-scale corporations quickly rose to dominance. Eager to retain control of the production process, corporate elites resisted negotiating with workers and occasionally called upon the state to resolve labor crises. American workers, who initially opposed state involvement, eventually turned to the state for assistance as well. The New Deal administration responded with a series of new labor policies designed to balance the interests of employers and employees alike. Since state intervention did nothing to permanently change employers' hostility toward unions, the New Deal legislation was short-lived. Gerber's broad study of this momentous period in labor history helps explain the conundrum of a nation with a typically limited government whose intense intervention in labor relations caused long-lasting effects.

The first volume in this two-volume set focuses on the years between Attlee and Wilson, which, with their transition from austerity to affluence, are sometimes stereotyped as halcyon days of industrial peace, but also a time of lost opportunity, when real opportunities to reform industrial relations and restructure trade unionism were squandered. The collection of essays aims to remedy the dearth of research on the trade unionism of the immediate post-war years and to go behind the facade and puncture myths.