Background

William Morris Leiserson was born on April 15, 1883 in Revel (now Tallin), Estonia, the son of Mendel Leiserson and Sarah Snyder, Russian Jews active in anticzarist movements. After the disappearance of her husband, Sarah Leiserson took her children to New York City in 1890.

Education

In 1904 he entered the University of Wisconsin. There his youthful socialism was tempered by the growth of a close professional and personal relationship with Professor John R. Commons, whose empirical and progressive intellectual tradition Leiserson would follow throughout his academic and public career. After graduation with B. A. in 1908, he continued at Columbia University where he earned his Ph. D. under Henry Rogers Seager in 1911.

Career

Leiserson started to work at age fourteen in a shirtwaist factory but attended political discussions at the Cooper Union and the University Settlement. During his college years he was a staff member of the Pittsburgh Social Survey; and helped to edit two volumes in Commons' Documentary History of American Labor. He also worked as an investigator for the New York Commission on Unemployment and Workmen's Compensation. His 1911 report to the commission, which served as the basis for his doctoral dissertation, recommended the establishment of public employment offices. He regarded such bureaus as a means of reducing frictional unemployment and assimilating recent immigrants, not as a form of state aid to those unfit for regular employment. Although his proposals, which were much influenced by the ideas of the English reformer William H. Beveridge, were not then adopted in New York, Leiserson was able to put some of them into effect in Wisconsin when Commons secured his appointment as deputy industrial commissioner of the state in 1911.

He set up a model network of public employment offices and also helped to found the National Association of Public and Private Employment Agencies. His advocacy of unemployment insurance, begun in 1913, was predicated upon an assumption that unemployment was an "unavoidable risk" of modern industrial life, to be ensured against by state action, but not eliminated or even substantially reduced. Leiserson continued his investigation of the employment market for the U. S. Commission on Industrial Relations in 1914 and 1915, then accepted a professorship in economics and politics at Toledo University.

Although Leiserson was a popular teacher and a productive scholar at Toledo and at Antioch College, where he taught from 1925 to 1933, he happily devoted the bulk of his career to public administration and the arbitration or mediation of labor disputes. During World War I he took administrative posts, first in Ohio and then in Washington, D. C. , to help organize an emergency system of public employment offices. While in the capital Leiserson worked frequently with Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, who asked him in 1919 to serve as arbitrator on the new Labor Adjustment Board of the union. For the next seven years Leiserson worked in Rochester, New York, and other centers of clothing manufacture to help institutionalize collective bargaining in the industry. In numerous articles and speeches he argued that strong unions and routine labor relations served to increase productivity and worker income, to bulwark social stability, and to counter the growth of left-wing ideology among American workers.

Leiserson achieved his greatest influence as a formulator and administrator of social legislation during the Great Depression. As chairman of the Ohio Commission on Unemployment Insurance in 1931 and 1932, he did much to advance the idea that unemployment benefits should be financed by pooled employer contributions administered by the state. Called to Washington in the early days of the New Deal, he helped draft National Recovery Administration (NRA) labor codes and served as secretary of the short-lived National Labor Board. Although he enjoyed the excitement of the New Deal, he disliked the improvised, often contradictory character of NRA labor policy. Hence he welcomed the opportunity in mid-1934 to chair the new, autonomous National Mediation Board, empowered to hold representation elections among railroad employees and to mediate labor disputes. A tough but supple and inventive mediator, he won the confidence of the railway brotherhoods and the American Federation of Labor (AFL), presiding over the elimination of company unionism while respecting traditional craft and class jurisdictions among the unions.

In 1939, Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins secured Leiserson's appointment to the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). At the time the NLRB was under sharp attack by conservatives and by the leadership of the AFL, which thought the board favored the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). Fearful that these forces might amend the Wagner Act, Perkins and President Franklin D. Roosevelt expected Leiserson to alter NLRB policy and personnel so as to conciliate the AFL and defuse demands for a major change in New Deal labor law. Once on the board Leiserson called for the dismissal of the powerful NLRB secretary, Nathan Witt, and a thorough reorganization of the large field division of the board controlled by the office of the secretary. He accused Witt and those loyal to him of incompetence, excessive legalism, left-wing politics, and a pronounced bias toward the CIO, but his controversial efforts to reorganize the NLRB were frustrated for more than a year because he was usually outvoted on the three-man board.

In November 1940, Roosevelt appointed Harry A. Millis, a friend and early student of Commons', chairman of the NLRB. The Leiserson-Millis majority forced Witt and many of his staff to resign. On the crucial issue of unit jurisdiction, they stressed the importance of stability and respect for the history of the collective bargaining relationship; hence, they tended to defend the claims of an older craft unit against those of a newer factorywide union. Where industrial unions were found to be appropriate, the new majority reversed an earlier board policy ordering multiplant units and instead mandated elections on a plant-by-plant basis. They also narrowed somewhat the employer duty to bargain and allowed replacements to vote in representation elections following a strike over chiefly economic issues.

Leiserson remained on the NLRB until 1943, but his commitment to traditional collective bargaining and minimal governmental interference in the process soured him on the wartime labor policy. He criticized the National War Labor Board for undermining free bargaining and union independence, and in May 1944 resigned in protest from the National Railway Labor Panel. He did so because the Roosevelt administration, inconsistent in its wage guideline policy, had rejected as inflationary a settlement that Leiserson had helped to mediate. During the next three years he was a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins. Leiserson died in Washington, D. C.

Achievements

• Leiserson was the twentieth century's most influential labor mediator during the rise of labor unions and collective bargaining in the United States. He was a member of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s "brain trust" which developed and wrote legislation such as the Railway Labor Act of 1934.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Adjusting Immigrant and Industry (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Adjusting Immigrant and Industry The purpos...)

  • American Trade Union Democracy

    (pledged their loyality)

  • Right and Wrong in Labor Relations

Connections

On June 22, 1912, Leiserson married Emily Nash Bodman; they had seven children.

Father:

Mendel Leiserson

Mother:

Sarah Snyder

Spouse:

Emily Nash Bodman

References

• William Morris Leiserson: A Biography
• Unemployment Insurance; The American Experience, 1915-1935
• The Making of the National Labor Relations Board: A Study in Economics, Politics, and the Law 1933-1937