The Formation of Contract Unionism: The Institutional Anchors of American Industrial Relations

This article is concerned with identifying the distinctive features of American unionism and explaining the specific historical contingency from which this particular form of unionism had originated from. Above all, American unions have been developed into “contract unionism”, one that can be characterized by its highly detailed formal contracts and quasi-legal structure of grievance procedure. The system contributed to the stabilization of industrial relations by reducing work stoppages, and by channeling worker discontents into formal grievance procedure. This article argues that wartime labor regulation was critical in laying the groundwork for contract unionism to take deeper root in existing institutional arrays. The union-government agreement for non-stop war productivity, the convergence of the CIO leadership and the pluralists’ orientation for ‘responsible unionism’, the expansion of rule-bound arbitration system were all been the products of wartime labor relations. They served as a firm basis for institutional development of US-specific union patterns.