John D. Rockefeller, Jr., founded Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc., or IRC, in 1926. In 2015, the organization rebranded as Innovation Resources Center for Human Resources, or IRC4HR. (Read more about our history.)
This section of our website presents a collection of IRC® white papers, research, and opinion pieces. While much of the research was conducted prior to 2010, the topics and issues have proven to be incredibly resilient and relevant to the workplace challenges that continue to confront employers, workers, and society in the current decade.
[A limited number of documents are currently featured below; check back periodically as we continue to make the IRC® archives — dating back to 1926 — available.]
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In the spring of 2003, huge demonstrations in France brought the nation to a virtual standstill
Public pension reform in France drove 300,000 workers, teachers, and students to march in protect through Paris.
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Between June and July of this year, 44,000 nonfarm jobs disappeared, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Between June and July of this year, 44,000 nonfarm jobs disappeared, according to the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. But during the same period, BLS reported a 0.2 percent drop in the unemployment rate. Why didn’t unemployment go up instead of down?
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Protests against globalization, particularly against investment abroad by American-based multinational companies (MNCs)…
Every U.S.-based company operating in the developing world is coming under scrutiny for how it treats its local workforce. The garment industry, on the frontlines of this new battlefield, offers an excellent case study from which other industries can learn.
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Throughout the ages, making clothing was the responsibility of the housewife, who sewed her family’s garments at home.
In his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, Alexander Hamilton wrote that in a number of districts two-thirds to four-fifths of all the clothes of the inhabitants were “made by themselves.”
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Paying for Employee Health Care: It Could Make You Sick
We spend more on health care, both absolutely and as a percentage of national income, than every other nation, yet our people are no healthier than other advanced countries’. Americans, moreover, are the least satisfied with their medical care system and are very concerned about losing their insurance coverage.
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The 75th Anniversary of Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc.
This issue of IRConcepts contains a brief history of IRC, summaries of the opening presentations, and outlines of the academic papers that would have been presented had not the vicious 9/11 attacks upon the United States occurred.
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Globalization: Context and Practicalities
Globalization is variously seen as the inevitable expansion of corporate capitalism—as a prime example of the “creative destruction” of the capitalist system, as a force for economic growth and development—and as a force that exacerbates income inequality and physical and cultural pollution.
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Changing Pay Practices
Faced with the need to survive in the global economy, U.S. companies have reconfigured their jobs, making them more broad-ranging, versatile, and autonomous. With those changes have come the need to reimagine how pay is delivered.
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The Case of the Missing Productivity: A Mystery
Business has been investing heavily in all forms of information technology (IT)—computers and related equipment, networking—in order to increase efficiency. Yet the official data on productivity continue to show relatively poor performance gains. An apparent contradiction continues to bedevil the American economy.
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Low Inflation and Low Unemployment: How Can it Be?
The situation the United States currently enjoys—low unemployment, low inflation, and rapid growth—has left economists struggling for an explanation in light of its apparent incongruity with the tenets of two predominant economic theories of the past 40 years, the Phillips curve and the “natural rate of unemployment.”
