| Public policy plays a key role in the history of United States industrial relations, yet we know relatively little about policymakers' active and ongoing efforts to gather theoretical and practical knowledge in order to identify possible solutions to industrial and social problems. During the 1920s, uncertainty about the changing character of the labor market in relation to new technologies and business organization, the need for effective methods for winning worker loyalty and maintaining high productivity after the end of mass European immigration, and the impact of mass consumption on traditional values stimulated the self-conscious expansion, diversification, and institutionalization of labor expertise. As the federal government curtailed its WWI involvement in important aspects of labor investigation, an array of academic, labor, business, and nonprofit institutions increased their scrutiny of the evolving "labor question." Between WWI and the onset of the Great Depression, labor experts learned a tremendous amount about the racial and gendered segmentation of the Unites States' workforce, the historic movement and purpose of wages in an increasingly consumer driven economy, and the potential of cooperation to ameliorate tensions and conflicts among worker organizations, workers, and employers. Recognition of important advancements in the collection of data and expansions in labor knowledge generally does not mean that labor experts developed a monolithic understanding of the American economy and workers' position in it. By the end of the decade, investigators, economists, and policymakers in government, union, business, and nonprofit organizations offered an ideology of cooperation that promoted an understanding of a "new American worker" stressing the need for greater workplace cooperation to increase production and wages. Proponents of this ideology stressed the necessity of increasing consumer spending in order to smooth the business cycle. Challenging this new mainstream labor discourse, advocates of the nation's poorest and most vulnerable workers developed a contending body of expertise which stressed progress but also critiqued the continued disadvantageous segmentation for wide segments of the workforce who struggled to escape arduous, low-paying occupations. |
