ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s and the early 1990s the U.S. labor movement received little scholarly attention. Much of what was written about organized labor treated it as a relic of the past—perhaps an impetus for innovation and positive change in the period between 1935 and 1975 but no longer an important force to be reckoned with. Influential industrial relations scholarship, such as Kochan, Katz, and McKersie’s (1986) The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, depicted the labor movement as unsuited to the modern environment: a dying and reactive force stuck in outmoded adversarial attitudes and relations.
