“The Learning Never Ends”: The New Industrial Relations and the Limits of Retraining in the Age of Deindustrialization
Neil Johnson, PhD Candidate in History, UC Santa Barbara
In the early 1980s, amidst a collapse in manufacturing employment and the worst economic crisis in half a century, a number of high-profile U.S. firms established retraining programs for their active and laid off employees. Focusing in particular on the auto industry and the Employment Development and Training Program (EDTP) established by Ford and the United Auto Workers in 1982, this article suggests that such programs served a function that was as ideological as it was economic. Inseparable from the so-called “new industrial relations,” the EDTP and its counterparts elsewhere signaled that plant closures, mass layoffs, and large-scale occupational restructuring would be handled jointly; that labor and capital were in agreement about how best to manage the human costs of deindustrialization.
Commentator: Eli Cook, University of Haifa
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