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Dissertation Information for Andrea E. Kluge

NAME:
- Andrea E. Kluge

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (1992)

ADVISORS:
- Jonathan Prude

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Mary E. Odem
- Michael A. Bellesiles
- Alex Keyssar

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Creating corporate culture: Welfare work in industrial America, 1890-1920

Abstract: In an era characterized by unprecedented industrial strife and violence, thousands of employers across the United States pioneered a new labor strategy contemporaries called welfare work. Favoring the gentle hand of management over the iron stick, welfare employers conferred benefits and services to workers exceeding contractual and legal requirements. In practice welfare work took many forms, ranging from leisure activities like gun clubs and cricket creases to more pecuniary perquisites like profit-sharing plans and pension funds. Not every company made welfare work an integral part of its labor management, but many did. By World War I, approximately 2,500 firms in the United States had adopted a labor policy based on ostensible business benevolence toward employees.

This study explores the origins, development, and legacy of American welfare work. Drawing on private and public company documents, government publications, contemporary literature, and labor records, it addresses three major areas: (1) the ideology and practice of welfare work; (2) labor's responses; (3) and the ways in which welfare capitalism altered the workplace and American industrial relations. I argue that welfare work occupied a distinct stage in the evolution of labor management in the United States, markedly different from what came before and after. Welfare work can be located on the broader spectrum of business benevolence, part of employers' ongoing attempts to paint a "human face" on capitalism. Welfare work was also a response to the exigencies of the day: changing conditions in the labor market and worker initiative, the coming of big business and a concomitant ideology wedded to industrial efficiency. Welfare work created an arena of negotiation between capital and labor at the turn of the century. Within this arena employers and workers each assumed an active role in protecting and advancing their interests. Ultimately, employees' responses to three decades of welfare work determined the fate of company welfare. By the end, employer and employee had carved out the contours of modern workplace reform; there had been, in every sense, a dialectic at work.

MPACT Scores for Andrea E. Kluge

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-05-31 13:42:01

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Students under Andrea E. Kluge

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None