'An alternative to industrial dictatorship': 100 years of the Council for Industrial Relations

Abstract

The year 1919 was pivotal for labor-management relations and for the public that witnessed shocking events -- employer-directed bombings and beatings of unionists, a peaceful syndicalist Seattle Strike, a violent Centralia Tragedy, railroad and telephone operator strikes, anarchist bombings of business owners’ homes and factories, the Spanish flu, and the beginning of the first Red Scare. Almost every newspaper featured front-page stories about the “labor situation.” It was a time of great price inflation, volatile economic growth, and technological uncertainty.