Managers and Work Reform: A Limited Engagement

Abstract

Work reform experiments broadly speaking, the attempt to find an alternative to the present hierarchical organization of industrial work are usually supported by a coalition of the right and the left. Managers want work reformers to discover some principle of organization which will increase labor productivity while making plant life so harmonious that workers are no longer attracted to unions; socialists see in work reform a first practical step towards worker self -management. Managers and Work Reform: A Limited Engagement opposesboth the left and the right in the name of an increasingly embattled middle position: it argues that unions and collective bargaining are necessary both because management itself needs to be constantly supervised and because radical change is impossible. This defense of the existing system of industrial relations is made here