Author: Jodi Starkman

In the 1950s, then-president Carroll E. French believed it would be good business to split the organization into a nonprofit that would retain the IRC name designator and a similar name for a company with the word “service” added to it.

During the early 1960s, it was revolutionary to see automobiles being assembled with very few human workers in sight on an assembly line.

In the late 1960s, IRC got a five-year research support commitment from Chevron, DuPont, Exxon, General Electric, General Motors, Gulf Oil, Procter & Gamble, Westinghouse, Western Electric, and Standard Oil of Indiana.

At IRC, everyone mattered, and everyone felt that our mission mattered. We were all a team.

Around 1955, the IRC staff developed a proposal for the Ford Foundation and the National Urban League to study the employment of African Americans in industry. This report had the working title “The Negro Study.”

IRC’s mission has always been to promote sound management and employee relations and to help companies be smart in managing their employee relations responsibilities.

So far as we knew, nowhere were agricultural workers included in any state’s unemployment insurance system.

I entered law school after college, and a friend from law school invited me to join him in his native Hawaii to work on a consulting project to assist the Territorial Government of Hawaii make the transition to statehood.

I will never forget the lesson taught by the one-question final exam for one of my philosophy classes.

I knew that at the end of my military service, I would need to find ways to learn to understand our world better than I did, and that my earlier focus on science was not the path to understanding.