ABSTRACT
This chapter examines to give an idea of how economists before the First World War looked at the problems which we now conveniently group under industrial relations. Economists had begun to show a little disillusionment with looking at the industrial relations problem, or the labour question as they called it, as one of exchange between two evenly matched monopoly organisations alone, and had started to approach the problem from the standpoint of production and productivity. The part of the chapter which follows shows that the neo-classicals did not completely understand the implications of collective bargaining and the difficulties involved in it. An understanding of that interplay of economic and social forces which one sees at work in the arguments of neo-classical writers on all policy questions in the Economic Journal and elsewhere, was well displayed by Chapman this was the spirit behind the rise of the Welfare State.
