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December 1995, Vol. 118,
No. 12
George W. Taylor: industrial peacemaker
Edward B. Shils
Dr. George W. Taylor, who died in 1972 at the age of 71, left behind a legacy of leadership in the field that he had founded as a young scholar in his late twenties, namely labor arbitration, mediation, and other sophisticated forms of alternative dispute resolution. These alternative policies and procedures for peacemaking, which in Taylor's time were directed to labor-management relations, today hold promise for the solution of other pressing social problems as well.
A staunch believer in the equality of the parties in collective bargaining, Taylor served for more than 40 years as professor of industrial relations at the University of Pennsylvania's famous Wharton School, at the same time playing an overriding role as the Nation's "Father of American Arbitration."
Despite his often quoted statement that he "had chalk in his veins" and hated to leave the classroom, Taylor nonetheless served as labor advisor to five U.S. Presidents-Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson-and, professionally, as a counselor and advisor to numerous U.S. Secretaries of Labor. Over his long career, he repeatedly left the campus to resolve more than 2,000 labor management disputes in the auto, steel, aircraft, defense, and apparel industries, to name only a few.
Taylor by inducting him into the U.S. Labor Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the U.S. Department of Labor attended by former U.S. Secretaries of Labor, academicians, arbitrators, lawyers, and leading dispute resolution professionals.
This excerpt is from an article published in the December 1995 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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