The first question I had upon starting Ronald Schatz's masterful new book, The Labor Board Crew: Remaking Worker-Employer Relations from Pearl Harbor to the Reagan Era, was how he settled on the topic. By the end, I had a good answer. Schatz's first book, published in 1983, was a study of electrical workers in the mid-twentieth-century United States. It was a textured story of the radicalism and repression of the Communist-led United Electrical Workers (UE), the civil wars within the labor movement, and the rise and decline of a great industry. These were questions one could expect from a scholar who had come of intellectual age in the era the New Left, and the result was a work of labor history that belongs on the syllabus that any student of the field must read to this day. But it was not a book that I thought would lead to another that celebrates—albeit not uncritically—the gray-suited industrial relations professionals that many historians of that generational cohort had once scorned.

The Labor Board Crew is not about rank-and-file militancy or employer reaction, but rather the efforts by that “small group of professors and attorneys” who sought to harmonize the differences between those classes, who felt their interests need not be understood as inevitably antagonistic (p. ix). Through a creative “collective biography,” Schatz shows how the figures who appeared at every major bargaining round and strike in every important industry during the postwar period—and who, behind the scenes, loomed large between them—all share a history. George Taylor, John Dunlop, Clark Kerr, and others mediated labor disputes, interpreted collective bargaining agreements, published widely, administered elite universities, and served presidents. But what unites them is that they all cut their teeth helping to manage the labor question during World War II.

The War Labor Board (WLB), of which they were a part, Schatz argues, did much to secure the foundation of the postwar labor movement through the maintenance-of-membership policy it established and, it is worth noting, to ensure that the war effort proceeded smoothly. Stalin, of all people, apparently agreed, having toasted “To American production” at the Tehran Conference, “without which this war would have been lost” (p. 27). The Soviet leader's words may not be worth much to those historians who have long lamented the labor movement's acceptance of a no strike pledge for the duration of the war. But that is easy to say after the fact, Schatz believes, when it can seem like beating Hitler was an inevitability. In real time, the question of production was every bit as important as questions of military strategy in the European and Pacific theaters. And given how intractably opposed so much of corporate America remained to the union movement—remember that the Little Steel companies and Ford did not settle until 1941—it was no small feat that a truce was achieved.

Schatz's response to my use of the passive voice would be to say that the Labor Board vets deserve the credit. So, who, politically, were these people? Unsurprisingly, few of his characters understood themselves as being on the left; Marvin Miller, a onetime Communist who worked for the Steelworkers before becoming executive director of the Major League Baseball Players’ Union, was the exception that proved the rule. But they were not on the side of management, either. Instead, they were inheritors of the institutional tradition in economics—people who thought about the function of power in industrial society and sought to create administrative mechanisms capable of controlling it. In short, they were basically New Dealers.

But, while interesting and important, the WLB “vets,” as Schatz affectionately calls them, are most relevant to the history of U.S. labor for what they did after 1945. In terrific detail over three chapters, Schatz chronicles how their work as mediators and arbitrators in the quarter century after the war served to institutionalize the power of labor in a way that, while perhaps unglamorous in retrospect, democratized the world of work to a degree not seen before or since. The sprawling contracts they helped to broker in the automotive, construction, and steel industries, for instance, established rules and procedures that for those workers fortunate enough to find employment in them—which, of course, was far from everyone—proved to be emancipating. And if those industries, or at least the unions that existed within them, have since fallen into decline, by the 1960s and 1970s their expertise landed the WLB vets in places where they could help to build the infrastructure of labor relations systems that remain very relevant today: the public sector and, interestingly, professional sports.

But while Schatz brilliantly demonstrates the significant role these figures played in shaping postwar labor relations, his attempt to classify the group under one label illustrates the contradictions always present in their work and highlights some of the limitations of collective biography as an interpretive approach. For one, they were all white, almost all men, and most came from some measure of privilege. It is hard to separate this background from their deep conviction that the class conflicts within industrial capitalist society could be permanently resolved, that while struggle may persist it could be contained. But by the late 1960s it was clear that this was not the case, and their responses to the sociopolitical pressures of the time, which were expressed macroeconomically as inflation, underscored how their unwillingness to pick a side could not be sustained. Taylor gave New York the Taylor Law, which to this day prohibits public-sector strikes. Dunlop served as President Ford's secretary of labor. And the WLB vets’ most prominent disciple, George Shultz, was a towering figure in three Republican administrations that drove forward the destruction of the New Deal Order. In the end, then, Schatz's story is a tragedy: how a group of “down-to-earth utopians” sought to reconcile the irreconcilable and how they failed.

But viewed from the era that followed, with organized labor gutted, workplace democracy curtailed, and economic inequality through the roof, it is hard not to admire their efforts and be amazed that there was a time when some of the most privileged, credentialed, and ambitious would pursue a career in industrial relations instead of at a private equity firm. They were products of their time, and the time was one when the working class had real power. Recovering that history and understanding what a world with an empowered labor movement looks like—with all its complexity, contradiction, and, indeed, banality—is crucial to the effort of imagining a better world. Schatz's new book is a valuable contribution to that project, and it is likely that a similar impulse inspired his interest in radical unionists nearly four decades ago.