This paper analyzes the institutional forces shaping and delimiting workers' control over shopfloor conditions in post-World War II U.S. manufacturing. It argues, in contrast to much liberal and radical discourse, that postwar relations between capital and organized labor never encompassed a set of institutional arrangements that could successfully contain class struggle in the labor process. During the 1960s a crisis emerged in shopfloor relations. It resulted from the contradictory nature of the postwar industrial relations system and, more specifically, from earlier actions by the state, the labor union bureaucracy and employers which bureaucratized the process of workplace dispute resolution, thereby giving management greater leverage in its shopfloor struggles with workers.
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