John Thomas Dunlop (July 5, 1914October 2, 2003) was an American administrator, labor economist, and educator. Dunlop was the United States Secretary of Labor between 1975 and 1976 under President Gerald Ford. He was Director of the United States Cost of Living Council from 1973 to 1974, Chairman of the United States Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations from 1993 to 1995, which produced the Dunlop Report in 1994. He was also arbitrator and impartial chairman of various United States labor-management committees, and a member of numerous government boards on industrial relations disputes and economic stabilization.
Dunlop taught at Harvard University from 1938 until his retirement as Thomas W. Lamont University Professor in 1984. While there, he was chair of the Economics Department from 1961 to 1966 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1973.
Dunlop came to be recognized in the postwar United States as the most influential figure in the field of industrial relations. Though primarily a labor economist and later an academic dean at Harvard University, Dunlop carried out advisory roles in every U.S. Presidential Administration from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. He mediated and arbitrated disputes in a wide variety of industries and over a range of issues in the formative post-World War II period. He also influenced the study of industrial and labor relations with his framework of an "industrial relations system" that arose from his scholarly as well as applied work. In looking back at his own legacy, Dunlop regarded himself fundamentally as a problem solver with an abiding interest in the workplace.
Among the numerous books Dunlop wrote are Industrial Relations Systems (1958, 1993); Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960, joint author); Labor and the American Community (1970, with Derek C. Bok); Dispute Resolution, Negotiation and Consensus Building (1984); and The Management of Labor Unions (1990).
Career Early life and education Dunlop was born in Placerville in northern California, where his family owned a pear orchard. Devoted Presbyterian missionaries, his parents moved to the Philippines when Dunlop was four years old, the eldest of a family that grew to seven children. He was raised and educated on the island of Cebu, and remained there until graduating from high school. Then, Dunlop returned to the United States with his younger brother William to enroll in college. Dunlop was initially rejected from the University of California, Berkeley because of his unusual background and instead enrolled at Marin Junior College in 1931.
Dunlop later transferred to the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1935. He remained there for his doctorate in Economics, where he produced the dissertation "Movements of Wage-Rates in the Business Cycle" (1939). While studying at Berkeley, Dunlop met with his wife, Dorothy Emily Webb; they married on July 6, 1937. That year, Dunlop attended the University of Cambridge on a fellowship, where he studied under John Maynard Keynes. At the time, Dunlop lived near John Kenneth Galbraith, who later became a colleague at Harvard.Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005, p. 93.
Although Dunlop's intention was to study with Keynes during the fellowship, the elder's poor health limited their interaction. Nonetheless, Dunlop's study of wage setting in the cotton mill industry based on fieldwork conducted during that visit led him to publish a major paper in The Economic Journal in 1938 demonstrating a problem in Keynes' depiction of wage rigidity in the seminal work The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936).John T. Dunlop, "The Movement of Real and Money Wage Rates." Economic Journal, vol. 48 (September 1938), pp. 413-434. The paper was reprinted with commentary in 1998 in the "Retrospectives" section of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, Spring 1998, pp. 223-234. In a laudatory note published with Dunlop's paper, Keynes acknowledged the correction and the contribution of the paper.
Professorial career Dunlop was shortly after offered a teaching fellowship at Harvard University's economics department that he maintained throughout the rest of his life. He was tenured in 1945 and became a full professor at Harvard in 1950. He later chaired the Department of Economics between 1961 and 1966, and was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences between 1970 and 1973. Dunlop was named Lamont University Professor in 1971.
Dunlop focused on wage determination and the role of markets and institutions in their determination. He wrote a series of articles in economic journals regarding the role of unions in wage setting, arguing that unions focused on balancing wage gains in collective bargaining against their employment effects.In this regard, see "Dunlop "Wage Policies of Trade Unions." American Economic Review, Supplement, vol. 32 (March 1942), pp. 290-301 and Dunlop Wage Determination under Trade Unions. Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: Augustus Kelley, 1966), pp. 32-44. He also explored the impact of product market forces on the level of wages, arguing that neoclassical models of wage determination underplayed the important (and sometimes idiosyncratic) role of product markets.John T. Dunlop and Benjamin Higgins, "Bargaining Power and Market Structures." Journal of Political Economy, vol. 50 (February 1942), pp. 1-26. In 1958, he brought together his scholarly work on wage determination with applied experience in dispute resolution in his seminal book Industrial Relations Systems.John T. Dunlop. Industrial Relations Systems, Revised Edition. Harvard Business School Press Classic, 1993. The book proposed a model of how an "industrial relations system" brings together product market, regulatory, and technological factors with the institutional practices of labor and business to produce wages, benefits, and other workplace outcomes. Several decades of scholarly debate followed its publication. He subsequently collaborated with Clark Kerr, Frederick Harbison, and Charles Myers on cross-national studies of the evolution of industrial relations systems, resulting in the book Industrialism and Industrial Man in 1960.Clark Kerr, John T. Dunlop, Frederick Harbison, and Charles A. Myers. Industrialism and Industrial Man. New York: Oxford University Press, 1960.
Dunlop trained several generations of doctoral students in the course of his career at Harvard. In the 1930s-50s, students included academics who became prominent industrial relations specialists, labor historians, and labor economists, including Irving Bernstein, David Brody, Morris Horowitz, Mark Leiserson, William Miernyk, Herbert Northrup, Jean Pearlson, Martin Segal, Jack Stieber, Lloyd Ulman, and Donald White. His students in the 1960s—80s went on to distinguished careers in labor and health economics, including Katharine Abraham, Kim Clark, Peter Doeringer, Richard B. Freeman, Jack Hirshleifer, Carol Jones, Garth Mangum, Daniel Quinn Mills, Joseph Newhouse, Michael Piore, James Scoville, Paula Voos, Michael Wachter, and David Weil. He collaborated with many other academics in a variety of fields including Frederick Abernathy, Derek Bok, Ray Goldberg, James Healy, Larry Katz, Clark Kerr, George Shultz, and Arnold Zack.
Along with his scholarly activities at Harvard, he was deeply involved in the creation of many programs and innovations at the university. In 1942, Dunlop, along with Professors Sumner Slichter and James Healy, co-founded the Harvard Trade Union Program, only the second executive program at Harvard (the first being the Neiman Fellows program in journalism) that continues to provide training to senior leaders in the labor movement in the US and around the world. He taught in this program from its founding until his death in 2003. An unnamed colleague told reporter Daniel Q. Haney of the Associated Press that Dunlop is "more at home with a plumbers' convention than with the Harvard faculty. He even sort of looks like a plumber, the way he always wears bow ties."Colleague quoted by Daniel Q. Haney, "New Head of Cost of Living Council Called a Strong. Awe-Inspiring Man," Nashua Telegraph, January 12, 1973, p. 3. He also helped to found in 1959 the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.The Joint Center for Housing Studies was originally formed as the Joint Center for Urban Studies of MIT and Harvard. Dunlop created a Policy Advisory Board for the center in 1971 made up of leading firms in the industry and organizations with major impacts on the sector. It became the Joint Center for Housing Studies, in 1985 and a self-standing institution within Harvard, jointly affiliated with the Kennedy School of Government and the Graduate School of Design in 1989. See http://www.jchs.harvard.edu/history. He played significant roles in the early days of the Harvard Kennedy School, and served as the acting director of its Center for Business and Government from 1987 to 1991.
Dunlop also played an active role in solving problems at the university. During a critical period in its history following the police bust in 1969 and subsequent shutdown of the university, Dunlop played a crucial role in restoring stability to the institution, leading a student faculty committee through a process to resolve the conflict and ultimately to introduce governance reforms. Following Nathan Pusey's resignation as president, he then served as Dean and as a close advisor to President Derek Bok during the tumultuous period of the Vietnam War, settling disputes between students, faculty, and the Harvard administration. Bok commented "He probably saved this university at a very critical time after the student riots in 1968-69" with "leadership and a cool head."Patricia Sullivan, "Labor Secretary John Dunlop Dies; Harvard Professor, Negotiator." Washington Post, October 4, 2003.
Many years later, following a highly contentious series of organizing efforts, a new union was elected at Harvard to represent clerical and technical workers. In light of the acrimony that accompanied Harvard's campaign against unionization, Harvard President Derek Bok tapped Dunlop to lead the university's management negotiation team. Dunlop negotiated with the lead organizer of the newly formed Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers Union, Kris Rondeau, what is widely regarded as an innovative collective bargaining agreement that focuses on problem solving and staff engagement. The agreement remains in effect today, the ninth contract currently being negotiated in 2012.
Dunlop was a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He remained on the Harvard faculty his entire life, taking emeritus status in 1985. Even after retirement, he remained active in research and teaching including leading newly established freshmen seminars at the age of 85.
Impact in Washington Dunlop began his work in Washington during World War II. On January 12, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9017 instating the National War Labor Board (NWLB). Charged with settling labor / management disputes in exchange for a no-strike agreement, the NWLB arbitrated disputes across major industries.He was also Vice-Chairman of the Boston Regional War Labor Board during this period. Because of its centrality in setting wages and benefits in a climate of military mobilization, limited resources, inflationary pressure, the NWLB's staff and leadership received a rapid-fire introduction to the problems and challenges confronting hundreds of enterprises.