What Have We Learned?

Two Birthdays, One Question

America turns 250 this year. At its birth, the nation declared "all men are created equal" while one-fifth of its population was enslaved. The nation promised "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" while enforcing indentured servitude contracts. The nation protected property rights extensively and labor rights not at all. These contradictions have sparked questions for two-and-a-half centuries

We're also celebrating a birthday this year: Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc. (IRC) hits 100. You've probably never heard of it. But if you work in HR, you're standing on foundations IRC helped establish. The organization emerged from one of America's bloodiest labor massacres (the Ludlow Massacre) to help professionalize the entire field of managing the employer-employee relationship. (There are a number of other notable, violent labor conflicts from the late 1880’s to the early 1930’s including the Haymarket Affair, the Homestead Strike, the Battle of Blair Mountain, the Harlan County War, The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, etc.)

To mark IRC's centennial, we're asking two questions:

• As we reflect on a century of workplace evolution, what fundamental lesson from the past continues to guide your thinking today?

• What emerging dynamic do you believe will most significantly (re)shape the relationship between workers and employers in the coming decades?

These questions frame everything we'll explore this year. The first is backward looking; the second, forward looking. Together they ask: What do employers and employees owe each other, who's going to decide, and why should it matter?

The employer-employee relationship has been repeatedly contested - through legislation, labor action, and violence - and rewritten roughly once per generation. We're on the brink of another rewrite, primarily driven by the perfect storm - AI, demographic changes in labor, and institutional erosion (governance, policy, and social contract breakdown). AI is restructuring work as fundamentally as steam power or electricity did. At the same time, demographic realities are colliding with outdated workforce models: retirements are accelerating, entry-level pipelines are thinning, and institutional knowledge is walking out the door faster than it can be replaced. Layered onto this is institutional erosion: weakened governance, fragmented policymaking, and a fraying social contract that no longer clearly defines the obligations between employers, workers, and the state. Together, these forces are destabilizing the very systems designed to govern it. The policy architecture hasn't caught up. Neither have our measurements. Neither, frankly, has the HR profession.

History suggests that the architects of real change were seldom presidents or legislators. More often, they were individuals who identified a broken system, tested new approaches within their sphere of influence, and found momentum in parallel efforts of others.

That's the story we'll tell this year. And the invitation we're extending to you, dear readers.

The Founding Paradox/Today’s Paradox

July 4, 1776. The Continental Congress adopts the Declaration of Independence. "Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness."

The man who wrote those words enslaved over 600 people during his lifetime. The economy that funded the revolution ran on coerced labor. His document proclaimed freedom, but said nothing about work.

America in 1776 had multiple types of labor relations operating simultaneously:

• Enslaved Africans (about 20% of the population): property, not workers

• Indentured servants: bound by contract, often for 4-7 years, to pay off passage or debts

• Apprentices: young people legally bound to masters, learning trades

• "Free" wage laborers: a minority, mostly white men, selling their time

The Constitution would count enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for representation purposes while granting them zero rights as workers. Property rights got extensive protection. Labor rights got… nothing. This, of course, was by design - a way to entrench political power in capital while denying labor both voice and protection. (Sounds familiar?)

Benjamin Franklin embodied the contradiction. He ran away from his apprenticeship indenture as a teenager - a crime that made him a fugitive. He later became a wealthy employer who ran ads for the sale of enslaved people in his newspaper. His autobiography celebrates self-made success while glossing over the bound labor that built his printing business. “Freedom for me; binding contracts for thee.”

A pattern emerged - America spoke the language of liberty while building systems of labor control. That tension persisted across 250 years, extending into today's debates over whether gig workers are truly "independent" or simply controlled labor wrapped in the vocabulary of freedom.

What Got Measured

If liberty and control were the organizing principles, measurement was the mechanism that made them operational. The first American "workforce metrics" were inventories.

Enslaved people appeared in ledgers alongside livestock and equipment. Auction records. Birth and death counts. Output measured in bales of cotton, bushels of tobacco, bodies moved from field to field. This was measurement in service of property management, not human development.

For indentured servants: contract terms, remaining time owed, skills acquired. The measurement question was simple: how much labor is still owed?

For "free" workers: there was almost no systematic data at all. No government-collected wage data. No bureau-tracked working conditions. To understand what workers earned or how they lived, one had to rely on scattered personal accounts and occasional newspaper reports.

What a society measures reveals what it values. Early America tracked property obsessively, while leaving labor largely unaccounted.

That absence wasn't neutral. You can't regulate what you do not measure, and you cannot protect what remains invisible. The measurement gap was a policy choice, and workers suffered for it.

Who Managed the Relationship?

The relationship between business owners and workers was not professionally managed at all, instead governed by Common law – under the doctrine of "master and servant." – using language that was meant quite literally. 

There was no "HR" in 1776, no personnel departments, no employee handbooks, and certainly no People Analytics functions (the proxy for measurement)! The employer-employee relationship (such as it existed) was managed through:

• Overseers for enslaved workers: control through violence

• Masters for apprentices: control through legal authority and custom

• Employers and foremen for wage workers: control through economic necessity

The idea that managing workers required specialized knowledge, professional training, or institutional frameworks simply did not exist. 

What we now call Human Resources would not emerge for another 150 years - and it would be forged in response to crises - not from foresight. 

By the late 19th century, the crisis had a name: the Labor Problem. From roughly 1880 to 1920, few issues dominated domestic policy more. Bloody strikes at Homestead (1892), Pullman (1894), and dozens of other sites escalated into pitched battles, mass destruction, and federal troops. In 1916, the U.S. Commission on Industrial Relations that concluded industrial relations was "more fundamental and of greater importance to the welfare of the Nation than any other question except the form of government."

Ludlow marked the breaking point.

The Birth of a Profession - the Ludlow Massacre

April 20, 1914. Ludlow, Colorado.

Colorado National Guard troops and private guards attacked a tent colony of striking coal miners and their families. Fire swept through. By the end of the shootout: ten men and a child were killed, the tent colony burned to the ground. The next day, two women and eleven children were discovered suffocated in a pit they'd dug for protection from the attack.

The mine's majority owner was John D. Rockefeller,Jr. Rockefeller wasn't at Ludlow. He'd never visited the mines. But when Congress required him to testify, the name "Rockefeller" and the word "massacre" became permanently linked. 

What happened next is the interesting part.

Rockefeller could have lawyered up and waited for the news cycle to pass. Instead, he hired Mackenzie King (later Canada's longest-serving Prime Minister) to diagnose the failure and help design a different approach.

In 1915, Rockefeller visited Colorado. He ate in mess halls. He toured the mines. He talked with workers. At a community gathering, he danced with miners' wives. Critics called it theater. Maybe. But he kept going, suggesting he may have been among the first industrialists to grasp something important: that labor was not merely a cost to be controlled, but a central driver of performance, stability, and profit.

The result: the Colorado Industrial Plan (1915). Employee representation committees. Grievance procedures. Regular labor-management meetings. Not a union, but a structure for worker voice.

By 1926, Rockefeller formalized these efforts into Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc. (IRC) - the first nonprofit consulting and research organization focused on labor relations in the nation. The organization's mission: "to advance the knowledge and practice of human relations in industry, commerce, education, and government."

​Between 1926 and 1940, IRC completed nearly 100 industrial relations audits for companies including U.S. Steel, RCA, and American Tobacco. IRC built broad-based industrial relations audits that included:

• Employee surveys (the birth of “attitude” measurement)

• Turnover tracking and analysis (data analytic’s birth?)

• Grievance procedure templates

• Benefits administration frameworks

• Salary surveys and job evaluation methods

What the SEC Took 100 Years to Notice

What distinguished Rockefeller was foresight. Long before regulators or investors had a vocabulary for it, he seemed to understand that labor was not merely a cost to be minimized, but a core driver of business performance. It would take the SEC until 2020 to formally acknowledge human capital as a material corporate resource through enhanced disclosure expectations. And even then - without rules-based standards that would allow stakeholders to assess effectiveness, efficiency, or return. We are still waiting for that clarity, despite its importance to investors, employees, and the public, and despite the principle of transparency that such disclosures are meant to serve.

Rockefeller’s underlying philosophy was radical for its time: employees weren't commodities to be purchased and discarded. They were long-term assets with psychological needs for respect and justice - ideas that would later form the foundation of Organizational Justice Theory. This early conception of "human capital" anticipated debates we are still having today about value creation, accountability, and whether organizations truly understand what drives sustainable profit.  

IRC's influence extended beyond companies. During the 1930s, the organization became the nation's leading authority on pensions and unemployment insurance. When Roosevelt formed the Committee on Economic Security to draft what became the Social Security Act, almost the entire IRC staff was placed on the committee's payroll. IRC staffers Murray Latimer and Bryce Stewart helped research and draft the legislation. Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the first female cabinet secretary, built the political architecture. IRC built the technical infrastructure.

Clarence J. Hicks who later helped establish and lead Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc. (IRC) played a formative role in launching industrial-relations research/teaching units at Princeton (1922) and later at the University of Michigan (1935), Stanford (1936), MIT (1937), Queen’s University in Canada (1937), Caltech (1939), and indirectly Cornell’s Industrial Labor Relations School (1945).

The DNA of modern HR traces back, in part, to a Colorado coal mine and one man's vision and initiative to build something different.

The Deal That Emerged

The IRC generation helped formalize an implicit deal:

• Employers provide: Stable employment. Rising wages tied to productivity. Benefits such as healthcare, pension. A voice through company mechanisms. Predictable career progression.

• Employees provide: Loyalty. Productivity. Restraint from organizing outside unions. Acceptance of management authority.

• Government provides: Social safety net (Social Security, unemployment). Baseline labor standards (minimum wage, overtime, safety). Enforcement to stabilize the system.

This model became known as "welfare capitalism." It offered workers tangible benefits, but left decision-making power firmly in the hands of the employers.

The same year Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act, he also signed the Wagner Act (formerly the National Labor Relations Act - NLRA). The NLRA created the NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and fundamentally reshaped worker voice by protecting the right to independent union organizing. The tension between employer-led reform and independent worker organization was never resolved. It still isn't.

Frances Perkins, who witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in 1911, helped build the legal infrastructure that followed. When Roosevelt asked her to join his cabinet in 1933, she outlined a set of non-negotiables: a 40-hour work week, minimum wage, unemployment compensation, abolition of child labor, Social Security. Roosevelt agreed, and Perkins became the first woman to serve in a Presidential cabinet.

The deal held through the post-war decades. Employers provided security. Employees committed their careers in exchange for job security and benefits. Personnel departments (the term Human Resources didn’t surface as a term until the mid 1960’s) grew to administer the increasingly complex relationship.

What Broke

The post-war social contract started to fracture in the 1970s, under pressure from converging economic and ideological shocks: Oil crises, stagflation, intensified global competition, and the rise of shareholder value doctrine. What had been designed for stability was suddenly operating in a world defined by volatility.

The consequences were structural. Union membership fell from a post-war peak of about 35% in 1954 to under 10% today. Defined-benefit pensions evolved into defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s - shifting the investment risk to the employee. Healthcare costs followed the same trajectory. Layoffs were reframed as "rightsizing."The implicit deal assumed stability. When stability disappeared, so did its foundation.

To understand where that deal is breaking down - and where a new one must be written - it helps to look at the four dimensions of: work, workforce, workplace, and worth.

Work changed: Stable jobs fragmented into gigs, projects, tasks. Human labor now increasingly overlaps with AI collaboration.

Workforce changed: Employees became contractors, temps, and platform workers. The boundary between "worker" and "not-worker" blurred.

Workplace changed: Factories gave way to offices, which gave way to anywhere. Employer responsibility became unclear and contested.

Worth changed: Productivity continued to rise, but wages stalled. Benefits eroded. The link between contribution and reward weakened - and in many cases simply broke. .

These four W's are the dimensions where the old deal is failing. They're also the dimensions along which the next deal must be written.

One Person, One Sphere, One Start

If the old deal is failing, the next question is unavoidable: who gets to write the next one? History suggests an answer: not governments, at least not at the start.

The New Deal didn’t originate in Congress. It emerged from state investigations after the Triangle fire; in company experiments after the Ludlow massacre, and by organizers who amassed power and legitimacy long before legislators validated it. The legislators did not lead these changes, they just formalized them. The statutes codified what pioneers had already demonstrated was possible and desirable.

Here is the pattern:

Person	Started Where	Did What	What Followed
Frances Perkins	NYC safety committee	Investigated factories, drafted enforceable laws	New Deal labor legal architecture
Rockefeller Jr.	His own companies	Created employee representation and welfare programs	IRC, professionalized the HR function
Sarah Bagley	Lowell Textile mills	Demanded government measure worker conditions and hours	First US government labor investigation
A. Philip Randolph	The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters	Threatened a mass march on Washington DC	Desegregated defense industries and Federal employment
Chavez & Huerta	California agricultural fields	Organized excluded workers	Changed who "counts" as a worker

None of these historical developments started with a movement. Each began with a decision of an individual to act within their own sphere of influence – and then find others willing to join them.

Frances Perkins was a 30-year-old social worker when she watched workers jump from the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. She didn't run for office. She became the secretary of a safety committee. Then an investigator. Then a commissioner. Then the architect of the New Deal. Her sphere of influence expanded because she started where she was, and worked tirelessly to right an injustice.

Rockefeller Jr. could have written a check and hired lawyers after Ludlow. Instead he went to Colorado, talked to miners, and built something that didn't exist before. He started inside his own companies. Then he built institutions that spread and encouraged the adoption of these ideas as “good business practice.”

Where You Can Start

The next deal won't arrive from Washington fully formed, particularly under an administration that treats workers as expendable and capital as sacrosanct. It'll be drafted in organizations by people who decide to measure differently, experiment with new practices, advocate for better policies to right injustices, and connect with others doing the same work.

You have a sphere of influence. It might be a team. A department. A company. An industry association. A professional network.

That's where the next deal gets written - one clause at a time.

W	The Question	What You Might Try
Work	What counts as work worth doing?	Audit your AI task allocation. Are humans doing meaningful, judgement-based (cognitive) work or just monitoring machines and validating outputs? Or just executing the output of AI?
Workforce	Who's covered by your policies? Who is not? How do you define “worker”? Human, digital?	Review who's excluded - contractors, temps, gig workers. Consider which protections, benefits, or standards could extend to them without waiting for regulatory mandates?
Workplace	What do you owe people wherever work happens?	Establish a right-to-disconnect policy? Define remote work standards? Commit to transparency around digital surveillance and monitoring tools?
Worth	How is value created and how is it shared?	Explore profit-sharing, equity participation, and lifelong learning access. Then tie workforce investment directly to long-term value creation, and measure HCROI.

Pick one. Try something.

2026

Beginning in 2026, each month we'll explore a chapter in how America has defined and redefined work – who changed it, which institutions they built, what ideas traveled internationally and what didn't, and what lessons still apply in your sphere of influence.

The First Factory Women. The Lowell mill girls were promised education and independence. Instead they got wage cuts and speedups. Sarah Bagley led America's first female labor protests and demanded the government measure working conditions.

Blood in the Streets. Haymarket. Homestead. Pullman. Ludlow. The most violent era in American labor history. Many of the rights we take for granted were secured only after blood was spilled. Despite our US President stating the most un-Christian sentiment of: “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them”, we as a society must not turn to hate and violence.

The New Deal's Architect. Frances Perkins handed FDR a list of non-negotiables before accepting the Secretary of Labor job. She got every one of them.

The Excluded. The New Deal deliberately excluded agricultural and domestic workers. Mostly Black, mostly brown, largely invisible. Chavez and Huerta organized the workers the law abandoned.

The Golden Age. A period when productivity gains were broadly shared, one income could support a household. When there was some balance between inputs and outputs - capitalists and workers prospered together.  We’ll explore the conditions present to explain why it ended.

The Rights Revolution. Title VII. OSHA. ADA. The shift from "employer discretion" to "employer obligation."

The Deal Cracks. Unions decline. Pension disappearance. What HR chose to measure and what it ignored.

The Empty Chair. German co-determination. Danish flexicurity. Different countries made different choices. What might America learn from these foreign examples?

And the list might evolve - the questions will not!!

Your Turn

IRC's centennial is an invitation to take stock and to act.

The deal that emerged from Ludlow's ashes was a 20th-century solution to 19th-century problems. It assumed stable employment with single employers, physical workplaces, clear boundaries between work and life, and an economy where productivity gains were shared.

Every one of those assumptions needs to be challenged in light of the new economy we’re facing. AI is the new steam engine. The gig economy is the new factory system. Remote work is the new urbanization.

The question isn't whether the deal will be rewritten – it will be. The question is who writes it, and whether workers will have a seat at the table when it happens.

IRC (now called IRC4HR) as it marks its centennial, is collecting responses to those two questions we opened with:

• As we reflect on a century of workplace evolution, what fundamental lesson from the past continues to guide your thinking today?

• What emerging dynamic do you believe will most significantly (re)shape the relationship between workers and employers in the coming decades? 

Share your answers at irc4hr.org/irc100

And ask yourself: What could you try, in your sphere of influence, this year?

Whether it’s 100 or 250 years in: the lessons are the same. The future of work is not written by abstraction or authority alone. It is written by people who act, who measure differently, who experiment early, who create compelling narratives, and who insist that work be governed not just for efficiency, but for dignity, fairness, and shared value. 

The question, then, is not what should happen. It is what you are willing to try. In your organization. On your board. In your classroom. In your research. In your policies.

Pick one problem of practice you have inherited about work and test it. Challenge the statement - “we’ve always done it this way.” Pick one metric that will help you understand the value contribution of your work force and track it - compare it to business outcomes to gain clarity. Pick one group/segment that is excluded in your workplace and make them visible. Document what works. Share it. Tell a good story. Find others who share your interest and passion.

That is how every durable rewrite has begun - and how the next one will, too. Be part of it!

And Happy New Year!

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This is the first post in our 2026 series "What Have We Learned?" Subscribe to receive monthly explorations of how America has defined what employers and employees owe each other and what you can do about it.