McKersie Legacy Honored, Examined in Inaugural Labor Day Lecture

The inaugural Robert and Nancy McKersie Labor Day Lecture was given by ILR Dean Alexander Colvin, Ph.D. ’99, on Sept. 4 on the Cornell campus.

The newest annual event on the ILR School’s calendar, the lecture honors the legacy of the late Robert B. McKersie and was made possible by a generous gift from Bob and his wife, Nancy.

“Through the event, we were able to celebrate the legacy of our great former Dean Robert McKersie and reflect on the lessons we can take from his ideas and scholarship,” Colvin said. “Bob was one of the leading thinkers in the field of industrial relations. Over some 60 years, he contributed foundational ideas that shape how we think about labor relations and, more generally, about bargaining and negotiations.”

The event began with reflections from Professor Bob Smith, who was part of a new generation of faculty hired by McKersie during his tenure as dean from 1971 to 1979. Smith recalled that McKersie faced the challenge of replacing a large group of founding faculty, stating that, through the new hires, McKersie was able to implement a “new vision for the school” while retaining “the same mission.”

Smith described 1970s academia as a place where there were often deep divisions among faculty members, but “the group of people Bob hired set a tone that you can find very relevant in the wonderful faculty we have today of civility and collegiality. I think a lot of this culture can really be traced back to Bob.”

“A lot of change agents are noted for their anger or their charisma or speaking ability or as being firebrands,” Smith continued. “Bob was someone who gave a lot of thought and care to his management style … he is remembered as having an easy smile, calm demeanor and an open door.” 

The reflections continued when McKersie’s son, Will, addressed the audience. The younger McKersie spoke of the importance of relationships and how that was central, not only in his father’s scholarship, but in the welcoming home his mother, Nancy, helped create on Fall Creek Drive.

Colvin began his lecture, “McKersie on Labor at America’s 250th,” by discussing McKersie’s most influential work, “A Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiation,” co-authored by Richard Walton.

“The classic 1965 book developed concepts for analyzing and understanding negotiations that are widely used in the field of labor relations and beyond, setting a framework that is used across the study of negotiations today,” Colvin said. 

He went on to explain that another of McKersie’s books, “The Transformation of American Industrial Relations,” co-authored by Thomas Kochan and ILR Professor Harry Katz, provided the classic analysis of how the post-war labor relations system had broken down.

“There was an attitudinal restructuring where corporate management broke with the pattern of ideological acceptance of union representation, collective bargaining and pluralistic labor relations,” Colvin explained. “This employer offensive led to a decline in union representation and collective bargaining coverage as management took a new aggressive approach in bargaining, vociferously resisted union organizing efforts and shifted production and capital to new nonunion facilities, often located in low unionization parts of the country.”

In subsequent works, McKersie built his scholarship on the idea of strengthening labor-management partnership and enhancing worker involvement.

“During this period in the 1990s and 2000s many of us in the industrial relations field, myself included, followed this lead, examining other examples and looking for evidence of widespread adoption and success of high-involvement work practices and labor-management partnership,” Colvin said.

According to Colvin, while McKersie’s classic analysis of negotiations was developed in the context of a much more highly unionized world of stable collective bargaining, the analytical structure that he and Walton developed has enduring power and can help us understand the state of labor today.

“Sixty years on, McKersie’s analysis continues to point the way for strengthening labor relations in America.”