Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation

Industrial Relations in Urban Transportation was first published in 1937. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

In the present era of industrial warfare and violence, this book points a "middle way" in employer-employee relations. It describes the remarkable achievement of the Amalgamated Association of Street, Electric Railway, and Motor Coach Employees of America, which for nearly fifty years has used the machinery of arbitration to settle all labor disputes without resort to strikes. Herein also is probably the first attempt to measure on a nation-wide scale the influence of a union in raising wages and reducing hours.

But this is much more than the story of a successful union. It is a complete history of urban transportation in the United States — the first such history to be written. It deals with technological, financial, and regulatory, as well as labor, aspects. The characteristics of transportation work and the type of men attracted to it are carefully analyzed, and there is a chapter devoted to the late nineteenth century conditions which gave birth to unionism.

This readable study will be of particular interest to owners, managers, and employees of local transportation systems, to investment bankers and investors, regulatory commissions and city aldermen, public mediators and arbitrators of labor disputes, and students of economic history.