Did American Welfare Capitalists Breach their Implicit Contracts? Preliminary Findings from Company-level Data, 1920-1940

Non-union employee representation in North America: diversity, controversy and uncertain future1

“…In a similar vein, Clarence Hicks (1941)-arguably the most prominent and influential proponent of NER among practising IR executives of that period-stated, 'To the extent that American employers recognise the common interests of management and men and invite their employees to co-operate with them through representatives of their own choosing, to that extent American industry will pass from the stage of autocracy and its counterpart, antagonism, to one of friendly co-operation'. The Welfare Capitalist model died or went into deep background in the Great Depression years (Jacoby, 1997;Moriguchi, 2005) and with it went the unitarist management model and positive conception of NER, replaced with the pluralist model of independent unionism and collective bargaining. Starting in the 1960s and 1970s, the unitarist model started to make a comeback, albeit repackaged as HRM and the high-performance work system (HPWS).…”

Implicit Contracts, the Great Depression, and Institutional Change: A Comparative Analysis of U.S. and Japanese Employment Relations, 1920-1940

“…Were these programs uniformly distributed or clustered to a small set of firms? Unfortunately, no micro-level data are available to test the correlations among different programs adopted; however, company-level evidence suggests that large establishments tended to adopt a set of comprehensive programs "en bloc," combining financial incentives, corporate training, centralized personnel management, and some form of employee participation (Jacoby (1985), p.118;Moriguchi (2002) Table 3). 21 The most expensive program was profit sharing, followed by supplemental bonuses and…”

“…The NICB survey likely understates the impact of the depression on corporate welfarism in at least three ways: first, the sample is biased towards very large establishments employing on average over 2,000 workers; second, company records indicate that downward revision and temporary suspension of welfare plans, which were unreported in the survey, were more prevalent than discontinuation (Moriguchi (2002)); and lastly, even if plans were in operation, the number of eligible workers fell drastically as most firms resorted to massive layoffs by 1932. 33 Latimer (1932) found that, by 1932, 10% of company pension plans were discontinued or suspended, another 10% curtailed the amount of benefits, and still others raised the amount of employee contribution (p.847).…”

“…NICB (1934), only 8.5% of paid vacation plans for salaried employees were discontinued, compared to 43% for wage employees. For company-specific evidence, see Moriguchi (2002).…”

Industrial Characteristics and Employment of Older Manufacturing Workers in the Early-Twentieth-Century United States

“…More importantly, industry-level variables pertaining to company-provided pensions cannot be constructed because systematic information is unavailable. Chiaki Moriguchi (2005) analyzed company-level data pertaining to the prevalence of retirement pension plans and other human resource management programs. However, Moriguchiʼs sample cannot be matched with the industry-level data utilized in this study because it consists of only 14 manufacturing companies and covers the period from 1920. relationship was perhaps beneficial for older workers, as indicated by the strong positive effect of Manager on P U .…”