The Employee: A Political History by Jean-Christian Vinel

Author:Jean-Christian Vinel [Vinel, Jean-Christian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: History, United States, General, Business & Economics, Labor
ISBN: 9780812209235
Google: RRUuAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2013-07-26T21:20:54+00:00

There was considerable overlap between the definition of professionalism and the definitions of management and supervision provided by Congress and the NLRB. Still, in the wake of the adoption of the Taft-Hartley Act, the NLRB further elaborated on the classification of “manager” and “employee” and put limits on companies’ claims on the loyalty of their workers. In 1950 in the New England Telephone case, it ruled that workers in charge of leading job interviews and recruiting new employees were indeed “managers” whose membership in a union was incompatible with the fulfillment of their duties in the interest of the company. This “conflict of interest” test, however, was not sufficient for sifting through all the potential managers, for many of them did not take part in elaborating and carrying out the management of the workforce. Indeed, following the Taft-Hartley Act, American companies made wide use of the title “manager,” which became a weapon in the fight against unions. After 1948, the ratio of the workforce that was classified by American companies as “supervisory” or “managerial” increased substantially—a pattern that was not discernible in other countries such as Germany and Sweden—which suggests that in the heyday of so-called labor-management accord, the struggle for power between these entities did not cease, but evolved into a less visible but equally important struggle over the sociolegal notions defining the limits of each group.22

The board subsequently adopted a second test, the “discretionary power” test, to determine which workers were involved in formulating and implementing the objectives of the company employing them. At stake in this test was the discretion enjoyed by managers in making decisions. Thus, in 1963, the board ruled that workers who determined the prices of the products sold in a shop were not managers—they only carried out the directives formulated by their superiors.23 Notably, this test allowed the board to firmly distinguish between the exercise of knowledge and true managerial prerogatives. In 1955, in Westinghouse Electric Corporation, the board decided that six engineers whose task was to determine whether a product was fit to be put on the market and at what price it should sell were not managers because the information they communicated to managers was the essence of their professional work.24

What the Bell Aerospace case revealed, however, was the organizational and technical evolution of American companies in the postwar era made it ever more difficult to distinguish between the exercise of authority characterizing managers and the exercise of knowledge that was embodied in any professional’s work. At first blush the buyers’ work was akin to that of many a professional insomuch as it was intellectual work, which was never routine, and required specific skills and training. They had to display the ability to make important decisions autonomously, and their position in the company’s organization shows that they were not managers in the traditional sense of the word. None of them ran the Purchasing and Procurement Department, and it is significant that they worked under the supervision of eight supervisors whom the UAW did not seek to represent.

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