George W. Taylor: industrial peacemaker

Monthly Labor Review, Dec, 1995 by Edward B. Shils

Dr. George W. Taylor, who died in 1972 at the age of 71, left behind a legacy of leadership in the field that he had founded as a young scholar in his late twenties, namely labor arbitration, mediation, and other sophisticated forms of alternative dispute resolution. These alternative policies and procedures for peacemaking, which in Taylor's time were directed to labor-management relations, today hold promise for the solution of other pressing social problems as well.

A staunch believer in the equality of the parties in collective bargaining, Taylor served for more than 40 years as professor of industrial relations at the University of Pennsylvania's famous Wharton School, at the same time playing an overriding role as the Nation's "Father of American Arbitration." Despite his often quoted statement that he "had chalk in his veins" and hated to leave the classroom, Taylor nonetheless served as labor advisor to five U.S. Presidents--Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson--and, professionally, as a counselor and advisor to numerous U.S. Secretaries of Labor. Over his long career, he repeatedly left the campus to resolve more than 2,000 labor-management disputes in the auto, steel, aircraft, defense, and apparel industries, to name only a few.

On January 5, 1995, the Nation and the Federal Government honored the memory of Professor Taylor by inducting him into the U.S. Labor Hall of Fame in a ceremony at the U.S. Department of Labor attended by former U.S. Secretaries of Labor, academicians, arbitrators, lawyers, and leading dispute resolution professionals.

Apparel, for a start

It is not at all surprising that George William Taylor should achieve eminence in a career of mediation and arbitration. He was born July 10, 1901, and reared in the Kensington section of Northeast Philadelphia, where an uncle owned a textile mill in which his father, Harry Taylor, was superintendent. So, when George Taylor graduated from Frankford High School in 1919, he was expected to enter the family business. But his school principal, George Alvin Snook, encouraged him to go to college, and, after earning a Mayor's Scholarship, he entered the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Finance and Commerce.

Choosing college was, perhaps, a sacrifice; while young Taylor was going to school, his friends in the hosiery mills were making as much as $13,000 a year, which, he later commented, was a lot of money then. But many lessons from his childhood years had been well learned. As a center of the textile and hosiery industries, Philadelphia was the right place, and the 1920's was the right time to make an impression on the youthful observer. In the textile and hosiery industries, Taylor had already seen much violenco--street fighting, trolleys overturned, even killings--and mutual distrust among and between labor and management, so that his studious, sensitive nature surely led him, even as a young man, to know that there should be better ways to settle differences.

During his college years, it seemed that Taylor was again in the right place at the right time. The Wharton School, which has as its symbol the anvil, had been established at the University of Pennsylvania in 1881 by Joseph Wharton, member of a family of ironmongers who founded Bethlehem Steel. As the first university school of business in the country, Wharton had created its Industrial Research Department to carry on scientific investigations of industrial organization, management, labor, and other economic factors in several important industries, much in the same way that scientific research up to that time had been associated--almost exclusively--with the medical and physical sciences. In 1927, the department undertook a study of the hosiery industry in Reading, PA, which was to follow a revised plan of economic research: rather than focus on one economic factor separately as it operated in various industries, the goal was to concentrate on the interplay of all the factors in a single industry or group of related industries.

Taylor took full advantage of the opportunities presented by Wharton and by the new directions in economic research, and they in turn molded his adult life. He chose for his Ph.D. thesis a subject then of concern in Reading and in his hometown of Philadelphia, and one in which, given his background, he was especially interested--the overdevelopment of the hosiery industry and the virtually certain deflation that was foreseen even at the time by manufacturers and union leaders alike. Following the publication of Taylor's thesis, and the awarding of his Ph.D. in 1929, the university appointed him a research associate in the Industrial Research Department, and asked him to undertake a study of the interplay of economic factors in the hosiery industry, with particular emphasis on the Reading situation. Results of the study were so valuable that it was extended to national scope in the hosiery industry, and similar studies were instituted in other industries.