<p>Hi. I am curious about the ILR program. What does ILR emphaize a lot in their curriculum and what was the purpose of its founding? I want like actual things they emphasize rather than things like ******** easy grades to get into law school or those who were not smart enought to get into CAS.</p>
<p>ROFL @ EASY GRADES </p>
<p>ILR is the School of Industrial and Labor Relations...</p>
<p>search for it on wikipedia and ilr.cornell.edu to read all about it...</p>
<p>the labor in "labor relations" specificially means those things related to labor unions and collective bargaining... </p>
<p>since labor unions arent very popular globally ILR SCHOOL today also includes very modern HR studies and Organizational Behaviour</p>
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since labor unions arent very popular globally
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<p>Seriously? Last I checked they are very popular globally. Just not in the U.S.</p>
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What does ILR emphaize a lot in their curriculum and what was the purpose of its founding?
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<p>The ILR School was founded directly after WWII to address a lot of the tension that existed between labor and management at the time. Portions of the Wagner Act were being repealed under Taft-Harley, and the country had a lot of questions with how to deal with employment policies in general, and union agreements in particular. So the school was founded to a) educate students to be able to better navigate the country's modern employment systems, b) pursue research on questions surrounding labor relations and figure out how to make the country's economy and workforce more productive, and c) server as an outlet for expertise that professionals could turn to across New York State and the country.</p>
<p>Since then, the ILR School has developed a lot. The fields of labor economics and social statistics have blossomed in the last half-century, and the School's labor economics department is among the top in the nation, even if most students do not take advantage of it. The core of the school -- the Collective Bargaining department -- features specialists in the fields of social and business history (e.g. labor history), comparative industrial relations experts (analyzing how nations structure the employer-employee relationship and reconcile the differences that exist between the two), and negotiation and conflict resolution. On the other side of the school are the two most business-focused departments, Organizational Behavior and Human Resources, which really both focus on how employers work with their employees, but the former of which includes a fair amount of overlap with the fields of psychology and economic sociology. </p>
<p>At the end of the day, the ILR School provides a broad liberal arts education in the social sciences (econ, sociology, psychology, American history, law, social statistics) that is subsequently applied to understand and analyze the way that labor markets work in countries and the way that employers and employees enter into employment arrangement.</p>
<p>If it seems narrow and limited, it is not. When you think about, virtually every aspect of social science inquiry is touched by the way people work. Do families have one or two income-earners in a household? Are labor union movements in South America a threat to free trade agreements? What determines whether or not an employer is impartial in hiring practices? How does a country educate its workforce at the secondary and collegiate levels? Will more government regulation result in a higher standard of living? What motivates worker productivity? Absenteeism? Why do baseball players get so much additional money when they go on strike? How does race or ethnicity affect people's livelihood? Should health care benefits be provided by government or employers? Or the big one.... who owns the means of production? </p>
<p>It's grounded in theory, but it's very pragmatic and applied. But you can get to The Big Questions About Life pretty quickly. Not that most students do, but it's there for the taking.</p>
<p>I would say about 60-70% of students actually make use of their ILR studies -- some go on for PhDs in the field, or masters degrees in law or negotiation. Around 25% go to law school, of which the vast majority focus on employment law and government policy. Another sizable chunk focuses on the labor movement (unions) or government work. And then another third goes in human resources or human resources consulting.</p>
<p>The others do anything from investment banking to designing video games.</p>
<p>cayuga...you know well as i do that most businesses would prefer not to have a unionized workforce...</p>
<p>i shouldnt even have said globally b/c well below the mason dixon line unions are a no-no...</p>
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cayuga...you know well as i do that most businesses would prefer not to have a unionized workforce...
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<p>And you know as well as I do that most non-exempt employees, given the choice and absent any coercion, would prefer to be in a union and enjoy the significant wage benefits that come with it.</p>
<p>Wow, there is a remarkable disconnect in this conversation. </p>
<p>Resurgam-- you're arguing that ILR has an incentive to stop teaching labor-management relations because "unions aren't popular globally." I can't even begin to make sense of what you're trying to argue. </p>
<p>You begin with the statement that unions are "not popular." Popular among whom? That unions are typically desired among employees (Cayuga is correct) and undesired among employers should suggest that there's a relevant conflict of interests despite legal protections that are designed to give workers representation from a union, should they so choose it. And why does this even matter? More than a third of public sector employees are unionized. And in both the US and abroad, even if employers may not <em>like</em> unions, they need to know to deal with them. Indeed, their animosity towards unions may even prompt them to hire or consult with people with specialized knowledge of labor law and collective bargaining. In a pessimistic sense, that provides some purpose to the department of labor history, labor law, and collective bargaining (the "CB" department). I can only presume you mean to challenge the relevance of this department in relation to declining unionization rates in the US, because the departments of labor economics and social statistics talk about unions even less than OB/HR does. </p>
<p>Next, your statement is just factually wrong. ILR has always had their hand in organizational behavior and human resources. Much of ILR's administration is actually committed to devoting resources towards <em>preserving</em> CB department at expense of HR and OB, not hastening its decline so it can catalyze some non-existent revolution into a business school for human resource managers. That was a big issue with the recent appointment of Harry Katz (a CB professor and expert on labor relations in the auto industry) as Dean instead of Jan Svejnar. </p>
<p>You said that "I shouldn't even have said globally because below the mason dixon line unions are a no-no." You mean to imply that globally they're unpopular, but below the mason dixon line (like globally) they're unpopular. This is ridiculous-- Anglo countries and particularly the US have more animosity towards unions than anywhere else in the world, and the South is the most punctuated of all. Almost every other country in the world has ratified ILO conventions protecting the freedom of association and collective bargaining, and unions figure prominently in the political discourse of OECD and developing countries alike. Yes, there is pressure from employers to curb the influence of labor unions, but the very existence of this tension is <em>precisely</em> why there's no shortage of careers related to labor relations abroad. </p>
<p>Finally, the CB department doesn't even equate the study of labor unions. There are three required CB classes: labor history, labor law, and collective bargaining. Labor history is the closest thing ILR has to a liberal arts requirement-- an economic and civil history of the American workforce, <em>not</em> just the history of organized labor. Next is Labor Law, which indeed emphasizes the National Labor Relations Act, but also includes discrimination, equal employment opportunity, and safety and health. Finally is collective bargaining, which includes the theory of negotiations with the explicit emphasis that such techniques are applicable beyond labor contract campaigns. Then, CB includes additional topics in employment law, labor history, governance, globalization, conflict management, arbitration (also very important outside labor-management relations), etc. </p>
<p>So yes, most businesses would prefer not to have a unionized workforce. But this has been true for all 202 years that labor unions have existed (taking the Philadelphia cordwainers as the first). That particular fact didn't make the study of unions irrelevant or unimportant fifty years ago, and it doesn't make it irrelevant or unimportant today. If anything, it is the declining union density in the US that reduces demand for careers that are heavily steeped in the American labor movement. </p>
<p>And Cayuga, after your fine introduction of the school, I expected a similarly fine rebuttal to Resurgam's non-sense. You too should be ashamed. </p>
<p>(still buds ;))</p>
<p>Well, I jut found his assertions so ridiculous at face value that they didn't need more than one line rejoinders.</p>
<p>If Resurgam is an ILR student, I can't imagine that he has completed more than a year of his education. He hasn't learned much about industrial relations.</p>
<p>Your characterization of labor history as 'an economic and civil history of the American workforce' is dead on. I was just getting into a debate with an '08 at dinner tonight about CB101 with Cowie. I was talking about how much I loved it; she how much she loathed it.</p>
<p>I think I owe you an email!</p>
<p>i apologize for my inability to articulate my opinions as well as you can...</p>
<p>i am a marxist at heart and my statement that unions arent popular globally was sort of aiming to demonize those corporations and governments that discourage unionizing...</p>
<p>and being from texas i guess i'm looking at it through a texan's view...having recently watched the movie "bordertown" just got me thinking and had me frustrated. labor organizers have been killed in mexico (in awful ways too)</p>
<p>Prof. Cowie is the only reason I made it to my 8:40 CB 101 classes.</p>