Industrial relations and uneven development: a comparative study of the American and British steel industries

American steel has a history of bloody conflicts of which the Homestead strike is perhaps the best known. Yet the origins of both systems lie in wrought iron industries in which techniques of production were identical and the industrial structure similarly fragmented, product markets were highly competitive and the sub-contracting system used to organise production. This paper traces the divergent development of industrial relations from this common starting point. The critical phase for the development of the US and British industrial structures was the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Important differences between the two countries can be found in growth and pattern in demand, in the application and development of new processes and techniques and in the structure of control of pro duction. These elements combined to produce the difference in the industrial structure and provide important clues to the divergent developments of labour organisation and industrial relations. The paper begins with a brief analysis of the interaction between production methods, technical change, the growth and structure of demand and their influence on the structure of the labour market. Having outlined these connections the paper focusses on the emergence and development of collective bargaining, stressing the importance of the factors discussed in the first section in moulding these arrangements. No attempt is made to analyse such important influences as differences in the role of the State, the ethnic composition of the labour force and other social and political phenomenon (see Holt, 1977). The omission is made partly because such a broad discussion is beyond the scope of the paper and partly because in our view such variables are contributory rather than decisive: the central factors influencing the relations between capitalists and their workers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century iron and steel industry in the US and Britain were the techniques of production, the