George W. Taylor: industrial peacemaker

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

"Never let failure go to your head." Likewise, Dr. Taylor

never let success go to his head, either.

William E. Simkin, formerly director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, viewed George Taylor as his teacher, counselor, and friend. Not only was he Taylor's graduate student, but he also worked with him as an associate impartial chairman on several major apparel contracts. Simkin believed that Taylor's greatest attribute as a teacher was his ability to illustrate a point by referring to one or more actual events or occurrences. An incident in a different context can be illustrative. At a hearing during Taylor's chairmanship of the Steel Mediation Board during the 1959 steel strike, a corporate labor lawyer insisted, "Let's not get bogged down with details." Taylor replied, "On the contrary, let's not get bogged down with generalities."

As Simkin describes Taylor's concepts of mediation, they seem to hold great promise for resolving local, national, and international conflicts. Of particular importance to the process is planning, and, Simkin said, George Taylor was a planner.

[Taylor would say: I "Don't take steps one, two, and three before

you have thought about steps four, five, and six." He would

emphasize the importance of obtaining the best possible grasp

of a problem in its entirety before initiating moves towards a

resolution of that problem.

According to Simkin, Taylor likened the development of a labor agreement to a story about a sculptor who had just finished an imposing elephant and was asked how he did it. "The sculptor said: `Oh, it's quite simple. You start with a big block of stone and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. Finally, what is left is the elephant.'"

Obviously, negotiation, mediation, and all forms of alternative dispute resolution require not only skill and experience, but also a latent competency that is part personality and part integrity, as well as sincerity and great personal warmth. George Taylor had all of these attributes, plus a generous dose of humility. His effective leadership in wage and price control during World War Il is best illustrated in Simkin's evaluation of Taylor's ingenuity:

Every time one put a seemingly intractable problem to him, he

would respond almost immediately with not just one, but many

ideas of how to deal with it. When he was in high gear, his

thoughts fairly exploded in such marvelous profusion and brilliance

that one felt completely overwhelmed ... George was always

an experimenter. When one solution was found to be inadequate,

he calmly turned to alternatives until a satisfactory

solution was found.

Federal labor laws. By 1933, Taylor had become an important advisor in the Roosevelt administration, especially with his leadership role in the construction of the National Industry Recovery Act. Having witnessed the disastrous competition in the hosiery, apparel, and textile industries, he was philosophically prepared to support emergency legislation that would lead the country out of what would become the Great Depression. In addition, he longed for a more concrete expression of the implications of the Clayton and Norris-LaGuardia Acts that moved toward the rights of employees to organize and bargain collectively.