Katz, Harry C. 1951- (Harry Charles Katz)

PERSONAL:

Born 1951. Education: University of California at Berkeley, A.B., 1973, Ph.D., 1977.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Ithaca, NY. Office—New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, 309 Dean's Suite, Ithaca, NY 14853-3901. E-mail—hck2@cornell.edu.

CAREER:

Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, assistant professor, 1977-82, associate professor of industrial relations, 1983-85; Cornell University, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Ithaca, NY, associate professor, 1985-88, director of Institute of Collective Bargaining, 1989-2000, director of National Telecommunications Research and Policy Consortium and coordinator of International Telecommunications Research Network, 1993-96, Jack Sheinkman Professor of Collective Bargaining, 1998—, currently dean. Member of board of directors, BellSouth-CWA, Employment Security Partnership, 1998-99. Consultant to businesses, including AT&T, General Motors, John Deere Corp., Continental Can Corp., Riverwood International Corp., Corning Inc., Brown and Williamson Inc., and Colgate-Palmolive, and to labor unions, including the United Auto Workers.

MEMBER:

National Industrial Relations Research Association (member of executive board, 1991-93).

AWARDS, HONORS:

George R. Terry Book Award, Academy of Management, 1988, for The Transformation of American Industrial Relations; General Mills Award, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, 1998, for graduate instruction.

WRITINGS:

(With Thomas A. Kochan and Nancy R. Mower) Worker Participation and American Unions: Threat or Opportunity?, W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research (Kalamazoo, MI), 1984.

The Impact of Public Employee Unions on City Budgeting and Employee Remuneration: A Case Study of San Francisco, Garland Publishing (New York, NY), 1984.

Shifting Gears: Changing Labor Relations in the U.S. Automobile Industry, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1985.

(With Thomas A. Kochan and Robert B. McKersie) The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, Basic Books (New York, NY), 1986.

(With Thomas A. Kochan) Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations: From Theory to Policy and Practice, 2nd edition, Irwin (Homewood, IL), 1988.

(Editor, and contributor) The Future of Industrial Relations: Proceedings of the Second Bargaining Group Conference, Institute of Collective Bargaining, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), 1991.

(With Thomas A. Kochan) An Introduction to Collective Bargaining and Industrial Relations, McGraw-Hill (New York, NY), 1992, 3rd edition, McGraw-Hill/Irwin (Boston, MA), 2004.

(Editor, with Maria Lorena Cook, and contributor) Regional Integration and Industrial Relations in North America: Proceedings of a Conference Held at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, Institute of Collective Bargaining, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), 1994.

(Editor) Telecommunications: Restructuring Work and Employment Relations Worldwide, ILR Press (New York, NY), 1997.

(With Owen Darbishire) Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems, ILR Press (Ithaca, NY), 2000.

(Editor, with Lowell Turner and Richard W. Hurd; and contributor) Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the Twenty-first Century, ILR Press (Ithaca, NY), 2001.

(Editor, with Samuel Estreicher and Bruce E. Kaufman) The Internal Governance and Organizational Effectiveness of Labor Unions: Essays in Honor of George Brooks, Kluwer Law International (New York, NY), 2001.

(Editor, with Wonduck Lee and Joohee Lee) The New Structure of Labor Relations: Tripartism and Decentralization, ILR Press (Ithaca, NY), 2004.

Contributor to books, including Public Sector Labor Relations: Analysis and Readings, edited by D. Lewin and others, Horton, 1981; The Economics of Municipal Labor Markets, edited by W. Hirsch, Institute of Industrial Relations, UCLA, 1982; Industrial Relations in the World Automobile Industry—The Experience of the 1970s, edited by W. Streeck and A. Hoff, Science Center, International Institute of Management (Berlin, West Germany), 1982; Challenges and Choices for American Labor, edited by T. Kochan, MIT Press, 1984; The Future of the Automobile, edited by A. Altshuler and others, MIT Press, 1984; Industrial Relations and Human Resource Management, Little, Brown, 1985; Between Fordism and Flexibility, Polity Press/Basil Blackwell (London, England), 1986; Collective Bargaining in American Industry, D.C. Heath, 1987; New Technology and Industrial Relations: International Experiences, edited by Richard Hyman and Wolfgang Streeck, Basil Blackwell (Oxford, England), 1988; The Transformation of Industrial Relations?, edited by G. De Santis, ENI (Rome, Italy), 1990; Reflections on the Transformation of Industrial Relations, edited by J. Chelius and J. Dworkin, IMLR Press/Rutgers University, 1990; Workplace Turbulence, edited by P. Doeringer, Oxford University Press, 1991; Research Frontiers in Industrial Relations, edited by D. Lewin, O. Mitchell, and P. Sherer, IRRA, 1992; Double Shift: The Transformation of Work in Post-Socialist and Post-Industrial Societies, edited by B. Silverman and others, M.E. Sharpe, 1993; The Origins and Evolution of the Field of Industrial Relations in the United States. edited by Bruce E. Kaufman, ILR Press, 1993; Change at Work, edited by Peter Cappelli and others, Oxford University Press, 1997; and Industrial Relations at the Dawn of a New Millennium, edited by M. Neufeld and J. McKelvey, New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations (NYSSILR), 1998.

Contributor to periodicals, including Personnel Psychology, ILR Review, Jaban Labor Bulletin, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Industrial Relations, Work in America, Personnel, British Journal of Industrial Relations, Labor Law Journal, Journal of Collective Negotiations in the Public Sector, Sloan Management Review, and Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations. Contributor to conference proceedings. Contributing editor, Personnel, 1984-87; associate editor, ILR Review, 1994—. Member of editorial board, Advances in Industrial and Labor Relations, 1987-94, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, 1989-94, Revista Latinoamerica de Estudios del Trabajo, 1997—, and Journal of Industrial Relations, 2000—; member of board of reviewers, Industrial Relations, 1984-88.

SIDELIGHTS:

Long associated with Cornell University's New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Harry C. Katz is a respected authority on trade unions and corporate negotiations with labor. The author, coauthor, and editor of numerous books in his field, Katz has explored areas such as worker motivation, quality of work life, and the evolution of employment practices in industrialized nations. In his first book, Worker Participation and American Unions: Threat or Opportunity?, written with Thomas A. Kochan and Nancy R. Mower, Katz explores how company programs encouraging working participation and quality-of-worklife issues affect the collective bargaining process and unions in general. Drawing on research from a project conducted by the AFL-CIO, the work discusses examples involving such companies as General Motors and Xerox to show that these worker programs had mixed results on employees' attitudes toward their jobs. Surveys detailed employee feelings about their unions, showing that they felt unions did a better job on issues such as salaries and benefits than on quality of worklife (QWL) problems and worker input on company goals. Yet, the authors hold that quality of worklife issues can best be resolved only when employers work closely with unions. "The authors suggest that collective bargaining may be shifting away from a ‘job control’ concept of unionism and toward one marked by ‘a more flexible and varied form of work organization,’" Richard P. Shore reported in a Monthly Labor Review article on the book, adding: "However, the extent to which such a shift actually occurs depends on the parties substantially redefining their roles and their preparedness to make tradeoffs that inevitably involve a measure of risk for both." While Shore held that the study is not perfect and would have benefited from a broader sampling of data, the reviewer concluded that "this is a well written and provocative work, one that is a refreshing departure from the often tedious rhetoric that clutters the mainstream of the QWL literature. In its relatively few pages, the authors distill much of the essence of the ongoing QWL debate into a logically developed and easily digestible discussion."

In another collaborative effort, The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, Katz and fellow professors of industrial relations Thomas Kochan and Robert McKersie continue to examine employee needs in the workplace. As with Katz's earlier work, he again asserts that workers want more out of their jobs than good salaries and benefits; they want job satisfaction. Yet the authors warn that when union leaders obtain responsibilities that include advising companies on corporate strategies, they risk alienating themselves from their membership and being seen as business managers. Still, such involvement is necessary, and the authors feel that changes in labor law would go a long way in assisting this evolution. "The Kochan-Katz-McKersie book is often not pleasant reading for union people—but we can use it to advance the union cause," remarked Markley Roberts in the American Federationist. Calling the work "a significant contribution to industrial relations literature," Kenneth McLennan concluded in his Monthly Labor Review assessment that the "authors present an excellent framework for analyzing current changes in collective bargaining and identify the circumstances under which the traditional approach of managing labor-management conflict is likely to prevail and the preconditions for moving to a more consensual bargaining relationship as a way of adjusting to economic change."

In the more recent Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems, Katz and collaborator Owen Darbishire examine employment practices during the last two decades of the twentieth century. Discussing auto and telecommunications industry employment in Japan, Germany, Australia, Italy, Britain, Sweden, and the United States, the authors note similarities in several trends within these nations, including human resources management, joint team-based employment, low wage employment, and Japanese-oriented employment. While Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations contributor Nick Wailes felt that much of the research contained in this book has been previously published, he added that the "authors have done a good job of updating some of this information, rendering complex institutional details understandable and presenting the information from country case studies in broadly similar fashion." Wailes continued: "Converging Divergences is more interesting in what it says about the relative theoretical and methodological sophistication of contemporary comparative industrial relations scholarship. Katz and Darbishire provide some evidence of increased variation in employment conditions across a range of countries. They also present evidence to suggest that while there are similar tendencies in each of their cases, institutional differences across the cases result in different distributions of the various employment patterns within the industries upon which they focus." George R. Boyer, writing in the Industrial and Labor Relations Review, asserted that this work remains "an important addition to the growing literature on comparative industrial relations, and in particular to the debate on whether globalization and the internationalization of markets is leading to a convergence of employment relations."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Federationist, March 21, 1987, Markley Roberts, review of The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, p. 8.

Industrial and Labor Relations Review, January, 1993, James L. Stern, review of The Future of Industrial Relations: Proceedings of the Second Bargaining Group Conference, pp. 407-408; January, 1996, Christopher L. Erickson, review of Regional Integration and Industrial Relations in North America, pp. 356-357; April, 2001, George R. Boyer, review of Converging Divergences: Worldwide Changes in Employment Systems, p. 681.

Labor Studies Journal, fall, 1993, Bruce Nissen, review of The Future of Industrial Relations, p. 68; summer, 1998, Mike Parker, review of Telecommunications: Restructuring Work and Employment Relations Worldwide, p. 80. Library Journal, July, 2001, Norman B. Hutcherson, review of Rekindling the Movement: Labor's Quest for Relevance in the Twenty-first Century, p. 105.

Monthly Labor Review, March, 1985, Richard P. Shore, review of Worker Participation and American Unions: Threat or Opportunity?, p. 50; February, 1987, Kenneth McLennan, review of The Transformation of American Industrial Relations, p. 42; March, 2003, Joy K. Reynolds, "Revitalizing Movement," review of Rekindling the Movement, p. 29.

Relations Industrielles/Industrial Relations, summer, 2000, Nick Wailes, review of Converging Divergences, p. 540.

Worklife Report, spring, 2001, review of Rekindling the Movement, p. 20.

ONLINE

Cornell University, School of Industrial and Labor Relations Web site,http://www.ilr.cornell.edu/ (February 15, 2007), brief biography and curriculum vita for Harry C. Katz.