ABSTRACT
George Barnett is not a household name even among labor economists. But in the first third of the 20th century he was widely regarded as one of the nation’s leading academic experts on trade unions and collective bargaining. Together with colleague Jacob Hollander, Barnett established Johns Hopkins University as a center of excellence for the study of labor-surpassed only by Wisconsin and the Commons/Perlman group-and authored over the years a number of influential, well-regarded studies. Barnett’s scholarly contribu tions were so favorably viewed by his peers that in 1932 he was elected president of the American Economic Association (AEA).
