Commission on Industrial Relations

The Commission on Industrial Relations (also known as the Walsh Commission) was a commission created by the U.S. Congress on August 23, 1912 to scrutinize US labor law. The commission studied work conditions throughout the industrial United States between 1913 and 1915. The final report of the Commission, published in eleven volumes in 1916, contain tens of thousands of pages of testimony from a wide range of witnesses, including Clarence Darrow, Louis Brandeis, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, Theodore Schroeder, William "Big Bill" Haywood, scores of ordinary workers, and the titans of capitalism, including Daniel Guggenheim, George Walbridge Perkins, Sr. (of U.S. Steel), Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie.

In 1871, there was a failed attempt to create an Industrial Commission. There was also the Hewitt committee hearings of 1878-79, the three-year study of the Blair committee which ended in 1886, and a probe conducted from 1898-1902 by the United States Industrial Commission, appointed by President William McKinley.

In 1910 two leaders of the Structural Ironworkers Union, the McNamara Brothers dynamited the Los Angeles Times building, killing twenty people. There was public outcry as a result and so President William Howard Taft proposed and Congress approved the creation of a nine-person investigative committee called the Commission on Industrial Relations. The Commission on Industrial Relations got its name from a petition presented to President Taft on December 30, 1911, entitled "Petition to the President for a Federal Commission on Industrial Relations", signed by twenty eight prominent people,Members of the Committee on Standards of Living and Labor of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, many who were charity workers involved with Survey magazine began a petition drive calling for a federal commission set up to investigate the causes of industrial violence.

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