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May, 1988, Vol. 111, No. 5

How the 1980's have changed industrial relations

Audrey Freedman

Union-management relations have undergone profound changes in the 1980's. The changes has been wrought largely by a force external to union-management relations: competition—from abroad, from deregulation, and from nonunion companies. The result is that compensation and employment are both more flexible and adaptive than in the 1960's and 1970's.

In my view, this shift has caused a fundamental change in human resource management practices. This is not a cyclical pattern of alternating ascendancy between labor unions and management.

This article examines the cyclical analysis of union-management relations in the light of evidence that the recent changes are broader and deeper than the traditional union-management dichotomy can encompass.

This excerpt is from an article published in the May 1988 issue of the Monthly Labor Review. The full text of the article is available in Adobe Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). See How to view a PDF file for more information.

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