The bar code is now at the core of commerce, transportation, warehousing, manufacturing, and retailing, and its influence has spread to virtually every industry in the industrialized world. When this voluntary product code was first introduced in 1974, it led to the worldwide revolution in supply chain efficiency. 
 To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of this now universally embraced technology, the Smithsonian Institution sponsored a symposium. Gathered together in this volume, are the thoughts of eight speakers--with hands-on experience--concerning the development, diffusion, adoption, and applications of a truly groundbreaking technology. The volume concludes with papers from a panel discussion among those involved in creating the Universal Product Code, the foundation of the bar code.

Twenty-Five Years Behind Bars: The Proceedings of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the U.P.C. at the Smithsonian Institution, September 30, 1999 (Wertheim Publications in Industrial Relations)

Computers & Technology

Harvard University Wertheim Publications Committee

The Housing Act of 1949 called for a "decent home and suitable living environment" for every American. The progress toward this goal over the last fifty years is generally a story of success. Kent Colton documents the remarkable progress in the areas of housing production, homeownership, and rental housing, the transformation of the nation's housing finance system, the role of government, and the place of housing in the economy. However, significant challenges remain and new issues have arisen. 
 This work looks to the future using case studies developed during the author's fifteen-year tenure as head of the National Association of Home Builders and includes discussions of real-world problems and the people involved. Highlighting the process of developing and implementing housing policy given the great challenges of working with many diverse interests, the author outlines a housing policy framework based on a set of principles for achieving common ground.

Housing in the Twenty-First Century: Achieving Common Ground (Wertheim Publications in Industrial Relations)

Politics & Social Sciences

Colton, Kent W.

Sociology

In twenty-three original essays this book reviews the course of labor economics over the more than two centuries since the publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. It fully examines the contending theories, changing environmental contexts, evolving issues, and varied policies affecting labor's participation in the economy.
While the intellectual framework of the book looks partly to the past--explaining the labor factor in classical and neoclassical systems--its emphasis is on contemporary problems that will figure prominently in future developments, such as the operation of internal labor markets, dispute resolution, concession bargaining, equal employment opportunity, and individual labor contracting.

Labor Economics and Industrial Relations: Markets and Institutions (Wertheim Publications in Industrial Relations)

Business & Money

Economics

The book is the first comprehensive study of the American copper industry to include labor markets, unionism, and labor relations as an integral part of its focus. It also undertakes a careful examination of the influences exerted by geography and geology in the shaping of the industry.
The study begins with the formation, development, and later histories of all the principal copper producers, their major business and labor policies, technical innovations, attempts at diversification, and foreign ventures. On the labor side, the book examines the beginnings of unionism in the 1880s; the emergence of the Western Federation of Miners in 1893; the later appearance of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in 1916. The eventual takeover of the Mine Mill by the Steel workers in 1967 and the reasons for the eventual collapse of the pattern system in 1983 are also carefully considered.
The study emphasizes the role of strategic innovations in shaping American copper history, most prominently in the successive development of underground block-caving and open-pit mining; concentration and flotation; and solvent extraction and electrowinning. The study concludes with an evaluation of the lessons supplied by the past and the prospects for the future of the industry.

Capital and Labor in American Copper, 1845–1990: A Study of the Linkages between Product and Labor Markets (Wertheim Publications in Industrial Relations)

Mangum, Garth

Hildebrand, George H.

The Universal Product Code (U.P.C.)--a small rectangle of black and white bars--adorns virtually every retail item we purchase. Yet twenty-five years ago, the U.P.C. was a mere kernel of an idea shared by a small cadre of manufacturing and chain store executives. Here Stephen Brown, the legal counsel of those pioneering executives, traces its origin and evolution. 
 The development of the U.P.C. illustrates the process of setting industry standards without government intervention and shows how systems of complementary technologies evolve. The economic consequences of the U.P.C. are investigated in an introduction by Professor John T. Dunlop and Jan Rivkin.

Revolution at the Checkout Counter: The Explosion of the Bar Code (Wertheim Publications in Industrial Relations)

Brown, Stephen A.

The Rise of the United Association is a study of the national union of plumbers, steam fitters, sprinkler fitters, and other pipe trades--the organization known today as the United Association of Journeymen and Apprentices of the Plumbing and Pipe Fitting Industry of the United States and Canada. 
 The study covers 40 crucial years in the history of national unionism of the pipe trades. In the beginning of the period (in the early 1880's) local unions of plumbers, gas fitters, and steam fitters were making first attempts to form a national organization of their crafts; forty years later, the United Association (UA) was unchallenged in its position as the national union of the pipe trades, and constituted one of the strongest organizations in contemporary building trades and in the AFL. 
 The Rise of the United Association concerns itself primarily with the description and analysis of the development and policies of the national union rather than with the history of local organizations of plumbers and steam fitters. In particular, the study deals with the factors that led to the rise of the first national organization of the pipe trades and then to the founding of the UA; with the complex process of internal reform that transformed the UA - originally a loose federation of locals - into a modern national union; and with the policies and tactics that eventually brought within the fold of the national organization all the pipe trades employed in building and other industries-- plumbers, steam fitters, gas fitters, sprinkler fitters, and others. 
 During the course of the forty years of unionism described in this volume the leaders and members of the national organizations of the pipe trades were confronted with many crucial and difficult issues - the relation of their organization to the Knights of Labor, the development of a viable system of union government and finances, the regulation of apprenticeship in plumbing and steam fitting, the problem of establishing jurisdictional lines among the members of a multi-craft union. The description and analysis of union policies toward these and other issues provide major insights into the process of growth of an important labor organization and, indeed, into the development of national unionism in America.

The Rise of the United Association: National Unionism in the Pipe Trades, 1884–1924 (Wertheim Publications in Industrial Relations)

Segal, Martin

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