Labour in the American economy

Some of the recent textbooks on the subject have endeavored to cover all this great variety by presenting an encyclopedie ex position. This has tended to produce an atomization of the sub ject which has obscured the broader picture. This volume is an attempt to reduce the vast detail of Labor Economics to a comprehensible sequence of ideas within one general frame of thought. The problems of Labor Economies are homogeneous only in that they are all related within the field of employer employee relationships. They are age-old conflicts between man agement and labor-repetitious interferences with the smooth operation of the national economy. Every labor problem involves the efficient relationship of employer and employee, and that is the only significant factor which ties them all together.

Within the broad limits of the subject are narrower fields of pure economic analysis, of political expediency, of social welfare, and of moral judgment. To segregate these special approaches to labor problems, and to treat them in isolation, is to run the risk of rendering them unreal and untrue. However, during the fol lowing pages, the needs of exposition require that emphasis be placed upon one or another of these approaches at different times. A good deal of economic theory lies back of the reasoning in the following pages, but never is the theory stated for its own sake. It appears only when necessary to explain a situation. Theory, after all, is a tool of economic analysis-a very fine tool, but a tool nevertheless. Good workmanship requires fine tools and cannot be accomplished without their use, but in the best craftsmanship the marks of the tools do not show. So also with labor history, which appears only when contemporary practices cannot be understood without a knowledge of their background and causes. Statistical materials are used sparingly and only for illustrative purposes. Available in almost any library are the latest issues of the Monthly Labor Review, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the United States Department of Labor, as well as other publications of the Bureau and of the various state agencies. These provide, in readily accessible form, current statistical and factual data more up to date than can be found within the covers of a book. The book is more con cerned with the giving of facts and ideas which will make pos sible a useful understanding of the current data as issued. they are

The actual jargon of the job and of labor relations is used with relative freedom, and the solemnity of academic language is reduced to a minimum. But for the intelligent reader who does not plan a career in labor relations, as well as for the prospective labor economist, an understanding of the real language used by the spokesmen for labor and managment in their dealings with each other is necessary. No apologies are made, therefore, for the occasional slang phrases which appear from time to time Some slang is as untranslatable for the labor economist as terminological Latin is for the botanist.

The book is frankly descriptive, but at the same time it is analytic, in the sense that it strives to show just what the real labor problems are, and synthetic, in the sense that it attempts to give some clue as to the meaning of it all. It does not seek to give all the facts or to follow all the bypaths or ramifications which constantly tempt the student into digressions. It tries to avoid losing the forest for the trees because only thus can labor problems be seen in their proper relation to the other factors in the economy.