Review

Reviewed Work(s): Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource
Management in American Industry by Bruce E. Kaufman
Source: Labour History , No. 98 (May 2010), pp. 258-260
Published by: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Inc.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5263/labourhistory.98.1.258

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258 Labour History • Number 98 • May 2010

liberties. The discussion is enhanced and informed by reference to 43 statutes from

Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, the Solomon Islands, South Africa, the
United Kingdom, and the United States; and reference to 44 legal cases from Australia
and the United Kingdom.
Overall the impact of Head’s discussion and analysis is dramatic, particularly as
he grounds his legal analysis in a reading of Australian history which demonstrates
the uncomfortable/unsettling proposition that Australian history, from early colonial
times onwards, is one in which martial solutions to political, social, industrial
problems are not strangers. Indeed, martial solutions are more common in Australian
history than allowed for by many historians.
Unfortunately Head’s book is a tad on the expensive side, and given its legal
tome appearance, might not reach a wide audience. But it should. It is the sort of
discussion missing in Australia since the Howard government, and now the Rudd
government, variously rubber stamped and endorsed ‘the War on Terror’. I suggest
that the book should be studied by the trade union movement, particularly unions
involved in strategic industries, like those in the maritime and mining industries;
according to Head’s analysis, they could well be on the future receiving end of
‘slippery’ definitions and political opportunism. And protest organisations should
study it too, particularly since the Hawke Labor government deployed troops against
protestors at the Nurrungar joint Australian-United States military satellite base in
1989; not necessarily an isolated event according to Head’s informed futurology.
As Head’s legal analysis makes clear, it is now easier, and more possible than ever
before, for politics in Australia to come from the barrel of a gun.

University of Wollongong ROWAN CAHILL

Bruce E. Kaufman, Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource
Management in American Industry, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008. pp. xiv
+ 376. US $79.00 cloth.

After the Civil War America started the long march to the development of a modern
employment system. Most workers were employed in small scale operations. The
approach of employers to managing workers was ad hoc and informal, reliant on
the working out of local forces of supply and demand. With the growth of markets,
changes in technology, and the nuances and complexities associated with industrial
life, employers found themselves needing to plan, co-ordinate and formalise their
approach to managing labour. This is something that is well known to any scholar,
irrespective of how they or others label them, who has examined the relationships
of those in the world of work.
Bruce E. Kaufman is concerned with examining this transformation in American
industry from the late 1870s, a period characterised by violent labour disputes, to
the early 1930s, with the advent of the New Deal and a legislative environment
favourable to unions. He traverses various techniques used by employers ‘to create
competitive advantage in the marketplace, maintain managerial control of the
workplace by keeping out union and government encroachment, and enhance the
social legitimacy of corporations and profit’ (p. 28). He also tells us that Managing the
Human Factor ‘is written for an academic audience’ (p. 32). It is not clear that it is.
Kaufman’s approach to the changes that occurred in managing people at work is to
conduct a literature survey of various readings that emerged during this half century,

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Book Reviews 259

sprinkled with more up-to-date secondary literature. His work is derivative. Other
than for finding some sources which he claims have escaped the attention of others,
this book is just one long literature survey. It should also be added that the book makes
use of a small font, with an even smaller version for quotations. Hiding behind the
skirts of others is something that scholars usually advise students to avoid.
This literature survey approach has created some major problems for Kaufman.
While he has undertaken extensive reading (his reference material runs to 57 pages)
it is not clear that he can see the wood for the trees. Virtually all of the writers that
he examines focus on the issues contained in the quote two paragraphs above.
While Kaufman identifies different approaches, and variants within the respective
approaches, this book contains more repetition than any other so-called academic
work I have ever read. Kaufman has assembled a series of quotes that say similar
things with different degrees of emphasis and/or modes of expression. He seems
to delight in finding more and more quotes which repeat similar viewpoints and
perspectives. Repetition, such as learning the alphabet, conjugating verbs and
practising times tables is something that occurs in primary school, not in books
intended for scholars.
The opportunity cost of devoting one’s time to organising material written by
others (the text of the book runs to over 300 pages) is not developing analytical
and conceptual skills. Kaufman says, ‘Certainly no person writing on the history of
management can assert after this that labour was not a strategic concern of American
companies until the 1930s’ (p. 33). It is doubtful in the extreme that academics
who have conducted research into and/or have knowledge of the world of work
in America in these years, would experience a similar epiphany. At a minimum,
readers of this and similar journals would know that labour has been a strategic
concern of American companies as expressed in their virulent opposition to unions,
both legal and extra- (or should it be less?) legal, and the associated violence of
American labour history.
Locked in the embrace of contemporary writings, Kaufman has found himself,
as sometimes happens to biographers, unable to distance himself from his topic.
In his conclusion he examines whether or not these early incursions into human
resource management (HRM) were in response to employer distaste and fears
associated with unions. He discounts such suppositions. He says the ‘central internal
forces propelling the development of HRM were growth in the size and scale of
organizations and development of more complex, interdependent, and machine-
driven production processes’ (p. 300).
However, and in contradiction to the above quotation, he is critical of the New
Deal and the advent of collective bargaining because it ‘substantially weakened
these firms and the competitiveness of the national economy’ (p. 303). For someone
who prides himself on his skills as a hunter of sources it is interesting to note that
he does not provide any evidence in support of this proposition. It is nothing more
than an unsubstantiated claim. He also says that outlawing various devices used by
employers to keep unions at bay ‘narrowed rather than expanded employee voice’
(p. 304). He goes on to maintain that unions only have a role in workplaces at the
bottom end of the labour market. In doing so he ignores the un-American part of
the civilised world which says that forming and/or joining unions is something that
workers should be free to decide for themselves, rather that their employers; as is
enshrined in the freedom of association provisions contained in various international
human rights instruments. Finally, in briefly musing on developments after the
period he has surveyed, Kaufman identifies how American firms have always sought

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260 Labour History • Number 98 • May 2010

to minimise and/or avoid union influence, and heralds developments in the 1960s
and 1970s when unions were in decline and employers were able to ‘rediscover
“unitarist” employment ideas’ (p. 304).
Employers in similar Western societies (let us avoid the Communist bloc)
experienced the same transformation from ad hoc informality to co-ordinated,
planned formality. In America, the development of human resource management
has been associated with a more or less virulent and violent opposition to unionism.
Managements in other parts of the civilised world made similar changes to the way
in which they organised work, changes which involved and/or incorporated unions.
In focusing on writings concerning the internal workings of American managers,
Kaufman has dismissed the nature of their behaviour towards the workers and
unions that have opposed them. While he knows that the world of work is pluralist,
that it contains workers and unions that contest the hegemony of employers, and that
employers have resisted such entreaties, his derivative reproduction of contemporary
writings on managing human resources has resulted in him supporting and
expounding a unitarist perspective. Academics dismiss work where there is such
a disjunction between ‘facts’ and ‘theory’. Rather than commenting on the work of
others, Kaufman would be well advised to do some original research of his own
and discover, first hand, how the world of work operates.

University of Melbourne BRAHAM DABSCHECK

Daniel Sidorick, Condensed Capitalism: Campbell Soup and the Pursuit of Cheap
Production in the Twentieth Century, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2009
(Australasian Distributor: Footprint Books). pp. 300. $48.95 cloth.

This volume provides a case study of industrial relations at Campbell Soup during
the twentieth century, with a particular emphasis on the Camden plant in New
Jersey. The dynamic of this account, as indicated in the volume’s subtitle, was the
continual drive by the company to screw down costs and attempts by workers, and
a series of different unions to which they belonged, at resistance ‘to achieve some
control over their working lives and livelihoods’ (pp. 2-3).
Overview accounts of American labour history usually provide information on
how employers experimented with ‘welfare systems’ in an effort to bind workers
to corporate objectives. This was not something that Campbell Soup bothered with.
It was unrelenting in its quest to contain and reduce costs and to regard workers as
automatons. At different times throughout the twentieth century, Campbell Soup
combined the carrot (incentive payments) and the stick (speed up, high production
targets accompanied by the ‘drive system’ and the threat of the sack) of the Bedaux
system; automation to reduce the need for labour; core and periphery workforces;
the segmentation of labour on age (boys rates), gender, racial and ethnic lines; quality
circles and lean production; outsourcing; downsizing; the opening of new plants in
low wage areas to divide and rule and forcing such plants to compete against each
other and closing down those plants and dismissing workforces who were not up
to the task.
When workers attempted to unionise, Campbell Soup sacked union activists and
refused to negotiate. Following the passage of the 1935 Wagner Act it found itself
forced to negotiate collective deals. At a time when the workforce was well organised
and prepared to take on the company, union progressive and leftist leaders gave up

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