The records consist of case files of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) about labor disputes, collective bargaining negotiations, and labor-relations training that the regional staff conducted for employers, unions, universities, and civic organizations in Michigan, Ohio, southern Indiana, and northern Kentucky. A few case files relate to labor disputes that extended into other states, including Pennsylvania, New York, Louisiana, and Georgia.
Commonly, case files contain complaints, job descriptions, reports, correspondence, and signed agreements about the origin of the dispute, the issues in contention, the sentiments of union and management officials, and mediation efforts. They also contain fact-finding reports, records of arbitration proceedings, and progress reports about the resolution of disputes between employers and the labor unions that represented bargaining unit workers, or the replacement of strikers with non-union workers. The FMCS promoted collective bargaining and voluntary arbitration as long-term solutions for sound and stable labor-management relations. The case files reflect those FMCS efforts, including special industrial relations educational programs that were initiated without relation to any specific dispute. Some case files also contain newspaper article clippings, company brochures, or labor union newsletters. FMCS efforts relied upon training and persuading labor and management officials, but lacked binding enforcement of law.
In certain cases, a dispute remained unsettled or escalated into a strike, lock-out, or other work stoppage that interrupted interstate commerce. A few case files contain references to petitions to U.S. District Courts for writs of injunction or other lawsuits, for which separate civil case files of the federal courts are extant. Some of the case files contain references to the permanent closure of a factory or facility. Many of the routine category 7 cases files contain documentation about factories, plants, occupational groups, and entire industries that no longer exist in the places where the labor disputes occurred. Most of the disputes appear to have occurred in small cities or towns, not in regional urban centers.
Examples of the diverse types of businesses and occupations that are documented in the case files include merchant mariners and sailors; bakeries and bakers; construction contractors and the building trades; dairy processing and dairy workers; distilleries and breweries; food producers and retailers; meatpacking companies and butchers; metal forge shops, steel mills, and iron and steel workers; coal mining, miners, and dealers in the coal trade; iron ore miners; quarry workers; petroleum refineries; natural gas works; lumberjacks, saw mill workers, and other workers in the lumber trade; radio and television broadcasting stations, cable television companies, and technicians; trucking firms and truck drivers; warehouses; furniture makers and upholsterers; sporting goods manufacturers and retailers; papermakers; public schools and school teachers' unions; government employees at the municipal, state, and federal levels of government; and nurses and other employees of nursing homes, hospitals, and other medical care establishments.
Some of the labor unions more commonly recorded on the cards included the Ohio Nurses Association; the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union; the Allied Industrial Workers; the Service Employees International Union; the United Auto Workers; the International Association of Machinists; the Hotel & Restaurant Employees and Bartenders International Union; the Metal Polishers Union; the Sheet Metal Workers' International Association; the Pattern Makers' League of North America; the International Brotherhood of Teamsters; the Aluminum, Brick and Clay Workers International Union; the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers International Union; the United Rubber Workers of America; the United Steelworkers of America; the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers; the Bakery and Confectionary Workers' International Union of America; the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen; the United Paperworkers; the International Typographical Union; the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers; the American Flint Glass Workers' Union; the United Glass and Ceramic Workers of North America; the United Furniture Workers of America; the Seafarers' International Union of North America, Great Lakes District; the National Maritime Union of America; the Amalgamated Transit Union; the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees; the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; the National Federation of Federal Employees; and the American Federation of Government Employees.
A few of the companies and government employers involved in labor-management disputes include the Ford Motor Company, the Chrysler Corporation, the Chevrolet Motor Division of General Motors; Sears, Roebuck and Company; the American Broadcasting Company; Storer Broadcasting Company; Republic Steel; the Social Security Administration; Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company; and B. F. Goodrich Company.
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Arrangement
Arranged chronologically by fiscal year, thereunder numerically by category of labor dispute (with category 7 case files occurring first), then numerically by case number. The Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) classified each labor dispute and mediation or technical assistance case into one of seven categories: (1) cases referred to Presidential Boards of Inquiry; (2) cases referred to FMCS fact-finding boards; (3) cases in which the Atomic Energy Labor-Management Relations Panel assumed jurisdiction; (4) cases identified in the FMCS annual reports to the U.S. Congress; (5) cases identified at the time of their occurrence as nationally significant in terms of economic impact or legal precedent; (6) dispute cases that originally were intended to be a sample to be transferred to the National Archives of the United States; and (7) labor disputes that, at the time of their occurrence, appeared to hold only ordinary significance.
