About John Thomas Dunlop
John Thomas Dunlop (July 5, 1914 – October 2, 2003) was an American administrator, labor economist, and educator. Dunlop was the United States Secretary of Labor between 1975 and 1976 under President Gerald Ford. He was Director of the United States Cost of Living Council from 1973 to 1974, Chairman of the United States Commission on the Future of Worker-Management Relations from 1993 to 1995, which produced the Dunlop Report in 1994. He was also arbitrator and impartial chairman of various United States labor-management committees, and a member of numerous government boards on industrial relations disputes and economic stabilization. Dunlop taught at Harvard University from 1938 until his retirement as Thomas W. Lamont University Professor in 1984. While there, he was chair of the Economics Department from 1961 to 1966 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences from 1969 to 1973. Dunlop came to be recognized in the postwar United States as the most influential figure in the field of industrial relations. Though primarily a labor economist and later an academic dean at Harvard University, Dunlop carried out advisory roles in every U.S. Presidential Administration from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. He mediated and arbitrated disputes in a wide variety of industries and over a range of issues in the formative post-World War II period. He also influenced the study of industrial and labor relations with his framework of an "industrial relations system" that arose from his scholarly as well as applied work. In looking back at his own legacy, Dunlop regarded himself fundamentally as a problem solver with an abiding interest in the workplace. Among the numerous books Dunlop wrote are Industrial Relations Systems (1958, 1993); Industrialism and Industrial Man (1960, joint author); Labor and the American Community (1970, with Derek C. Bok); Dispute Resolution, Negotiation and Consensus Building (1984); and The Management of Labor Unions (1990). In March 1975, President Gerald Ford selected Dunlop as his first Secretary of Labor. At the time, Dunlop lived near John Kenneth Galbraith, who later became a colleague at Harvard. As a result, the agreement created a private system of union recognition, collective bargaining and dispute resolution accepted by the parties.
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