Taylor was born in the Kensington industrial neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on July 10, 1901. He was the son of Harry D. Taylor and Anna C. Lahnemann. His father was the superintendent of a hosiery mill in the Kensington section, and it was assumed that after his graduation from Frankford High School, Taylor would follow his father and other members of the family into a managerial career in the local textile industry.
An exceptional student throughout his school days, Taylor was encouraged by his high school principal to matriculate at the Wharton School of Economics of the University of Pennsylvania, one of the nation's premier colleges of management. He completed his entire higher education at Pennsylvania, earning a B. A. in 1923, an M. B. A. in 1926, and a Ph. D. in 1929.
Even before earning his doctorate, Taylor accepted a position in 1924 as chairman of the Department of Business Administration at Schuylkill College (later Albright College) in Reading, Pa. , where he also coached the football team. He remained there until 1929. In that year, he returned to the University of Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the university's Industrial Research Department and an associate professor of labor relations in the Wharton School.
By then an acknowledged expert in industrial relations and one of the pioneer academics who mediated and arbitrated contractual disputes between unions and management, Taylor in 1931 served as the impartial chairman charged with implementing a new national labor agreement between the Full-Fashioned Hosiery Manufacturers of America and the American Federation of Hosiery Workers. After he assisted the employers and the union in arranging a new contract, Taylor remained as impartial chairman until 1941 (he acted in a similar capacity in the Philadelphia men's clothing industry between 1935 and 1961).
During the New Deal years, when the national government grew more involved than ever before in regulating industrial relations, Taylor's role as a mediator and public administrator magnified. Between 1933 and 1935 he chaired the Philadelphia district office of the National Labor Board established under the National Recovery Act to guarantee the right of workers to form unions of their own choosing and to bargain collectively. In 1935, he became the assistant deputy administrator of the National Recovery Administration and, two years later, an adviser to the National Fair Labor Standards Administration, established to implement the National Fair Labor Standards Act of 1937.
Because of his excellent work in those positions and his repeated stints as umpire to resolve union-management disputes, President Roosevelt in 1942 named Taylor vice-chairman of the National War Labor Board (NWLB), the agency charged with supervising labor-management relations for the duration of the war. In 1945, the agency's final year, he served as chairman. Taylor designed the NWLB's single most famous ruling, the Little Steel award of 1942, which strictly regulated wartime wages to counter price inflation; he offered unions security for the duration of the war through the "maintenance of membership" principle in return for unions' commitment to discipline unruly workers; and he legitimated the principle of collective bargaining. Taylor and his colleagues on the NWLB essentially guaranteed the success and stability of the New Deal-instituted regime of industrial relations, in which independent trade unions and management bargained collectively and voluntarily in order to turn labor-capital relations away from conflict toward accommodation. The system, as conceived by Taylor, depended on the services of "neutral" mediators-arbitrators, drawn largely from the academic and legal communities, as well as direct state intervention when voluntary private bargaining failed to resolve disputes peacefully and hence threatened the general welfare.
After the war, Taylor continued to work for the government and unions and managements as administrator, impartial umpire, and mediator. Among other positions, he served as the secretary of President Truman's National Labor-Management Conference (1945); as chair of the advisory board of the Office of War Mobilization and Reconversion (1946 - 1947); as chair of the National Wage Stabilization Board (1951 - 1953); as chair of President Eisenhower's Board of Inquiry for the Steel Strike (1959); as a member of the President's Advisory Committee on Labor-Management Policy (1960 - 1968); as chair of presidential inquiries and boards to investigate disputes in the aerospace industry (1962), among railroads (1964), and in the copper industry (1968); and as mediator and arbitrator in the Philadelphia women's clothing industry, the city's construction trades, and for jurisdictional disputes within the Congress of Industrial Organizations. In his career as adviser on industrial relations to public officials and private parties, Taylor was perhaps best known for his work as chair of New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's Advisory Committee on Public Employment Relations, which culminated with the state legislature's passage of the Taylor Law (1967). The law guaranteed public employees the right to join unions and bargain collectively but also penalized unions and their members for participating in strikes. The law reflected Taylor's long-standing commitment to the contradictory principles of voluntary collective bargaining and illegality of strikes by public employees. The law was so unpopular with public employees that Taylor himself conceded that "this is one law the legislators didn't fight to have their names on. "
Almost until the time of his death, Taylor, a pleasant, short, and rotund man, continued to teach labor economics and industrial relations and to act as mediator to resolve industrial disputes. Owing to his long and active career as a public administrator and mediator, Taylor did not publish profusely. Among his major publications were The Full-Fashioned Hosiery Worker (1931) and Government Regulation of Industrial Relations (1948). He coedited New Concepts in Wage Determination (1957).
He died in Philadelphia.
Taylor was one of the giants in the field of industrial relations, a creator of the mid-twentieth-century concept of collective bargaining, by which unions and managements negotiated voluntarily to avert strikes, which, in Taylor's view, threatened the public's welfare. For him, successful collective bargaining preserved the best in capitalism, and by creating order out of conflict, promoted the essence of democracy. President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Taylor the Presidential Medal of Freedom on December 3, 1963. On January 5, 1995, Taylor was inducted into the U. S. Department of Labor Labor Hall of Fame for his contributions to industrial relations.
He married Edith Ayling, a high school classmate, on June 18, 1924. They had no children.
He was an American sociologist.
He is an American economist, elder statesman, and businessman.
He was a Canadian-American who became an American industrialist, federal civil servant, and noted labor union mediator.
He was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America (UMW) from 1920 to 1960.
He was an American labor union leader for 57 years.
