By Johanna Weststar, Western University and Shelagh Campbell, University of Regina, Emerita

It was a delight to review the Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations (RI/IR) issues from 1955-1964 and make time for reflection. We found it a useful exercise to engage with the trajectory of our field and connect historical roots to contemporary understandings. It is a critical archive to have the back issues available in open access, often with extended abstracts in French and English. 

In its second decade, RI/IR continued to be an anchor for the burgeoning field of industrial relations (IR). The journal accomplished this through content and form. Regarding content, many articles are of a sweeping nature, locating the place of IR in intellectual thought and developing the ideological terrain of the field. In addition to maintaining the analysis of papal encyclicals and Catholic Social Justice, of such great interest to the journal’s founders, the range of debates expanded in this period to encompass early discussions of research methodology, the ‘proper’ role of government in managing labour relations, the evolution of both corporatism and socialism in the US and Canada, union democracy and autonomy, the emerging profession of personnel management and the institutional development of social welfare. In terms of form, we see the journal playing an important role in what we would today call broad stakeholder knowledge mobilization. Our review contained over 220 contributions across 36 volumes. Volumes often included up to five contributions, which reported on the proceedings of conferences and meetings as well as current events. The journal also continued to publish regular columns sharing details of emerging jurisprudence. The contributors include academics, but also world of work actors. Furthermore, well before periodical indexing, websites and electronic searches, in 1963 the journal published a summary of all back issues, including reports from the 18 industrial relations conferences convened by the Département des relations industrielles at Université Laval. As an important milestone flowing from this foundational work at Laval, the final volume in our review contained two papers which were presented at the first meeting of the Canadian Industrial Relations Research Institute, held at McGill University on July 6th, 1964.

A deeper examination reveals two specific themes: Building the Field via Experimentation on a Grand Scale and What’s New Again. 

Building the Field via Experimentation on a Grand Scale
First, it is hard not to come away from the articles in this decade without feeling that the field is being constructed before your very eyes. In noting the source and form of contributions in addition to their content, we can understand the type of academic work that was being done and crafted. We can see attention paid to the applied nature of the discipline as a tight mesh between public policy makers, union and employer-side actors, and scholars was shaping experimentation and the creation of institutional structures. This was facilitated by two forces: considerable external engagement by academics and formalized information sharing with IR stakeholders. These efforts helped to define the relevant body of knowledge for IR practice and established the journal as a place to consult regularly. Furthermore, we saw here a clear attempt to influence practice and public policy and to maintain a pluralism of thought and dialogue. Throughout this decade there were many contributions regarding the role of the state including commentary on legislative debates and political discussions. Some articles were written by people working for the Department of Labour. One was even penned by the Honourable Louis St. Laurent and published less than a month following the end of his term as Prime Minister. Notably, the journal anticipated the passing of the PSSRA in 1967, with an increasing number of articles debating the role of unions in the public sector and for public servants, specifically. 

We found evidence of experimentation on a grand scale in numerous articles that engaged brand new ideas - many relating to the creation of important institutional structures that we now take for granted. These included discussion about efforts by the United Auto Workers and other major unions to win yearly wage and income guarantees from US employers and how these anticipated supplemental employment benefit plans (SEIBs) would intersect with the Canadian unemployment insurance system. Articles investigated other emergent practices such as pay-for-performance, profit sharing, formal disciplinary schemes, and job evaluation tools. Considerable space was given to discussing and critiquing internal practices and policies of the labour movement. The affiliation of the Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada (CTCC) with the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC) was a great preoccupation during this decade with topical spillover, including discussion of union identity, autonomy, democracy, jurisdictional dualism and secularism, the need for labour unity and the potential Americanization of the Canadian labour movement. Against the evolution and maturation of the labour movement, there are articles describing the formation of employer associations (e.g., the Retail Merchants Association) as employers realized that they needed to organize to face the strengthening unions and formalize their skills. Early initiatives to professionalize the “personnel man” as the precursor to the HR manager were facilitated by universities in Quebec, which developed management training sessions; Laval offered an early diploma. 

Experimentation extended to the academy itself. We saw evidence of increased academic scope and rigour, which included developing formal methodologies and international content and comparison. We chuckled at the words of Frederick H. Harbison, a labour economist at Princeton, who wrote in his 1955 piece comparing managers in German and US steel works, “Yet, even on the basis of this admittedly sketchy pilot analysis, we can safely make some valid generalizations on the potential usefulness of comparative studies of this kind.” One piece outlined the first calculation of unemployment rates by the Federal Bureau of Statistics, and another explained the coding system developed by the Ministry of Labour to analyse collective agreements. On the international front, in addition to significant work on US labour relations, we saw a history of British trade unionism, an article on the particularities of Belgian trade unionism, one about how the white collar and blue collar unions influence the state in Sweden, an account of strikes across five countries, and a paper on the industrialization of regions of southern Italy. In this decade we also marked the evidence of a core tradition in IR scholarship, which is the analysis of specific strikes and labour disputes. Such scholarly work, then and now, is critical as part of the historical record of labour. Interestingly, the two papers featured from the precursor to the Canadian Industrial Relations Association (CIRA) conference were both from an economics lens looking at research gaps and opportunities with respect to how labour markets are understood. This marks an evolution in the field with the entry of labour economics in addition to the previous sociological and jurist perspectives. It is necessary to point out, however, that gender diversity is not a feature of the journal’s contributors in this decade. Based on an assessment of authors’ names, not a single contributor was a woman. Therefore, we must couch these exciting times of institutional building as coming from a male-dominated frame both in the academy, unions, management, workplaces and the political leadership.

What’s New Again
We were struck by the notion that “as all things change, so they stay the same”. The debates about public sector bargaining in 1964 sound very similar to those about the right to strike and essential services today. The discussions of technological change ring true as the core debates regarding innovation, obsolescence and just transition have not changed. The rationale for SEIB and guaranteed income could be transposed almost directly to the debates about government intervention to stabilize workers and the economy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, the words of sociologist Rodney F. White from his 1955 article about guaranteed wages represents a universalism in the struggle, “The present day and age is characterized by a general feeling of insecurity in all areas of daily life”. However, there are some notable differences in the style and approach of the articles in this decade compared to the contemporary period. Of note, many articles are historical. We attribute this to the desire to create and formalize a historical record of IR, particularly in Quebec, but we also see retrospectives of the formation of the ILO and other international bodies. Our review has led us to speculate whether we are as aware of our history today, in the face of information overload and a sometimes-utilitarian feel to academic work. We wonder if our comparative work today can be characterized as geographical home versus away instead of then versus now and what might be the implications for the field. Anticipating slightly our colleagues tackling the next decade, we must also note the emergence in 1976 of our other strong Canadian journal, Labour/Le Travail, which retains a focus on labour history and perhaps diverted such work from RI/IR.

We’ll leave you in closing with two quotes that struck us as good messages for academics and practitioners across the ages as we attempt to make sense of the complicated world of work.

“When problems arise in industry and in labor relations, let us try to consider them on their merits with complete intellectual freedom and without allowing our minds to be circumvented by such stupid obstacles to the exercise of intelligent and realistic judgment.” 

Justice Ivan Rand (Vol 17(4) 1962)

« Toutes mes vues personnelles dans la présente étude de la L.R.O. n'ont pas valeur d'évangile peut-être, mais j'y ai mis conscience et désintéressement et ma meilleure volonté de servir »

Alfred Charpentier (Vol 16(1) 1961), former President of the International Union of Bricklayers and of the Confédération des travailleurs catholiques du Canada