What is Industrial Relations

In Industrial relations, Industry can be viewed as an economic activity that includes manufacturing, producing, or processing of goods or services performed by a group of individuals. And, relations means the connection and communication pertains between the employer and the employees within a workplace.

History of Industrial Relations

Industrial relation has its roots in the industrial revolution which created the modern employment relationship by spawning free labour markets and large-scale industrial organizations with thousands of wage workers. As society wrestled with these massive economic and social changes, labour problems arose such as low wages, long working hours, monotonous and dangerous work, and abusive supervisory practices led to high employee turnover, violent strikes, and the threat of social instability. 

Historical Facts

• Industrial relations was formed at the end of the 19th century as a middle ground between classical economics and Marxism, with Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb’s Industrial Democracy (1897) being a key intellectual work. 
• Institutionally, it was founded by John R. Commons when he created the first academic industrial relations program at the University of Wisconsin in 1920.
• Another scholarly pioneer in industrial relation and labour research was Robert F. Hoxie. 
• Early financial support for the field came from John D. Rockefeller Jr. who supported progressive labour–management relations in the aftermath of the bloody strike at a Rockefeller-owned coal mine in Colorado. 
• In Britain, another progressive industrialist, Montague Burton, endowed chairs in industrial relations at the universities of Leeds, Cardiff, and Cambridge in 1929–1930.
• During the Second World War, these were suppressed by the arbitration powers of the National War Labor Board. However, as the Second World War drew to a close and in anticipation of a renewal of labor-management conflict after the war, there was a wave of creations of new academic institutes and degree programs that sought to analyze such conflicts and the role of collective bargaining.
• In the 1950s, industrial relations were formalized as a distinct academic discipline with the emergence in the UK of the so-called “Oxford school”, including Allan Flanders, Hugh Clegg, and Alan Fox, Lord William McCarthy, Sir George Bain, as well as Otto Kahn-Freund.
• Lastly, by the early 21st century, the academic field of industrial relations was often described as being in crisis. In academia, its traditional positions are threatened on one side by the dominance of mainstream economics and organizational behavior, and on the other by postmodernism.

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