Yale Labor and Management Center

The Yale Labor and Management Center was a research center that was part of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. It was founded in late 1944 or 1945 and existed until 1958 or 1959. Its stated mission was to engage in "the study of the basic principles of human relationships involved in industrial relations and analysis of the forces operating in the labor market." It was led by its only director, E. Wight Bakke, a noted Yale professor of economics and specialist in industrial relations.

The period from the early 1930s to the end of World War II saw a rapid increase in membership of labor unions in America, and with that came frequent and sometimes violent labor-management conflict, only temporarily suppressed by the arbitration powers of the National War Labor Board. The center was part of a wave new academic institutes and degree programs that sought to analyze the role of and collective bargaining, which had assumed a much greater (and sometimes violent) role in American life since the 1930s. The most known of these was the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, but counting various forms there were over seventy-five others. The new Yale center was one of the few newly formed entities that chose not to include some form of "industrial relations" in its name.

The new center was created as part of the Yale Institute of Human Relations and was housed with it in a wing of the Sterling Hall of Medicine on Cedar Street in New Haven. It was initially funded by a fellowship which allowed Bakke to get five each labor and management representatives to come to the campus for joint studies. A policy committee made up of three each Yale, labor, and management representatives was set up to oversee the research projects the center would undertake and ensure neutrality of approach.

Bakke's aim with the center was to establish a scientific approach towards establishing and testing hypotheses about human actions in industrial relations and thus establish an explanatory theory of behavior, with the eventual goal of finding ways to reduce the amount of labor-management conflict. He said, "I am convinced that the lack of theory of human behavior is our most serious handicap in the development of policy in labor relations. Management, union leaders and workers all must have a working knowledge, validated by experience, of such questions as: (1) why does the other person behave as he does? (2) why does he change from one kind of behavior to another? (3) how will this proposal or this action affect him – and why?"

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