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Half a century ago, John R. Commons spoke of "a new equity that will protect the job just as the older equity protected the business."¹ Commons' concept of equity comes closest, for me, to getting at the bundle of rights implied by the U.S. Department of Labor's statutory mission "to foster, promote and develop the welfare of wage earners of the United States...."²

A generation after Commons, Professor Richard A. Lester of Princeton University captured the modern essence of equity in his "welfare concept." The welfare concept encompasses the "network of employer obligations and employee rights that involve not only the dignity and well-being of the individual worker but also the security and well-being of the members of his family."³

This article takes as its standpoint the precept that the modern state requires a department of labor or equivalent to guarantee equity as a necessary condition of social stability. Our focus is on how this equity idea has fared in theory and practice over the 75 years of Department of Labor guarantorship.

This excerpt is from an article published in the February 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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Footnotes

1 John R. Commons, Legal Foundations of Capitalism (New York, Macmillian, 1924), p. 307. Commons was a University of Wisconsin professor who, with his students and colleagues, laid much of the intellectual groundwork for the "new equity."

2 Public Law 426, 62d Cong.

3 Richard A. Lester, "Revolution in Industrial Employment," in E. Wight Bakke, Clark Kerr, and Charles W. Anrod, Unions, Management and the Public (New York, Harcourt, Brace and World, 1967), p. 471; and Labor Law Journal, June 1958.

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