ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the changing political and legal conflicts that transformed employee relations and strengthened management power in the late twentieth-century United States (US) political economy. The fully institutionalized industrial relations system involved substantially different mechanisms for recruiting workers; calculating the costs and benefits of striking; and interacting politically with the employers, the public, and the government. Unions lost much ground because companies effectively commanded far greater political and economic resources than organized labor could mobilize. Unions received significant support from political allies outside the workplace, particularly from the Democratic Party and President Roosevelt's New Deal administration, which enacted key labor relations legislation to rein in employer power. The Mitsubishi sexual harassment case propelled into public view several aspects of the usually subterranean struggle for power in corporate and public workplaces. By the end of the twentieth century, titanic struggles for employee power in the workplace had won few grudging concessions, leaving managers firmly grasping the levers of organizational power.
