The “Limited Capital-Labor Accord”: May It Rest in Peace?

Abstract

This essay takes on a major pillar of the social structures of accumulation (SSA) literature: the “limited capital-labor accord.” The accord is shorthand for an industrial relations structure based on job-control, politically conservative unionism, and state-regulated collective bargaining during the period of 1948—1973. Our essay shows how this stylized assumption of industrial relations history has been empirically rejected by labor and business history and industrial relations scholarship since the 1980s.