LABOR MARKET POLICY AMERICAN STYLE: STATE CAPACITY AND POLICY INNOVATION, 1959-1968 by YONGWOO JEUNG A DISSERTATION Presented to the Department of Political Science and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy March 2020 DISSERTATION APPROVAL PAGE Student: Yongwoo Jeung Title: Labor Market Policy American Style: State Capacity and Policy Innovation, 1959- 1968 This dissertation has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in the Department of Political Science by: Gerald Berk Chairperson Craig Parsons Core Member Joseph Lowndes Core Member Daniel Pope Institutional Representative and Kate Mondloch Interim Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded March 2020. ii © 2020 Yongwoo Jeung This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (United States) License. iii DISSERTATION ABSTRACT Yongwoo Jeung Doctor of Philosophy Department of Political Science March 2020 Title: Labor Market Policy American Style: State Capacity and Policy Innovation, 1959- 1968 This dissertation delves into the American state’s capabilities by examining its experiments with corporatism and labor training during the 1960s. The dissertation relies on the frameworks of layering, patchwork, intercurrence, and entrepreneurship from various disciplines including comparative historical analysis, historical institutionalism, American Political Development, and the school of political creativity. The dissertation first challenges the mainstream view that regards as impossible any tripartite bargaining among U.S. labor, management, and the state. The United States experimented with the unique tripartite committee—the President’s Committee on Labor- Management Policy—in the early 1960s to address emerging problems such as automation and intractable industrial conflicts. The tripartite committee, created by Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg, was to provide a new deliberative platform to labor, management and the state. The experiment was short-lived due to reignited turf wars between labor and management. The failure paved the way toward further encroachment on collective labor rights and the uneven rise of individual employment rights. It also contributed to the Kennedy administration’s transition in its policy orientation from conventional Keynesianism with public spending to the unconventional macroeconomic iv measure of cutting taxes. The dissertation also challenges previous literature that sees the American state’s fundamental limitation in implementing interventionist social and welfare policy. By examining the origins and evolutions of the War on Poverty (WOP) training programs, I reveal that the legislative history of various manpower programs was a patchwork of improvisational responses to national and regional change. From the Johnson administration’s attempts to update WOP programs to respond to the inflation of 1965, the issue of unemployed adults, and Martin Luther King Jr’s request to “hire now, train later,” I claim that the fragmented nature of the American state could promote new solutions to new problems. This study contributes to American political development scholarship by providing a non-Weberian optimistic perspective in analyzing the American state. It shows how entrepreneurial politics can promote reform in the fragmented structures of the American state, shedding light on the ways of continuously recalibrating the American state’s capacity. This dissertation includes previously published material. v CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Yongwoo Jeung GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Seoul National University, Seoul, Republic of Korea DEGREES AWARDED: Doctor of Philosophy, Political Science, 2020, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Political Science, 2015, University of Oregon Master of Arts, Political Science, 2011, Seoul National University Bachelor of Arts, Sociology, 2009, Seoul National University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: American Politics American Political Development American Political Economy U.S. Labor Market Policies and Race Comparative Political Economy GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Moody Research Grant, LBJ Foundation, 2017 William Mitchell Summer Research Funding, University of Oregon, 2017 William Mitchell Summer Research Funding, University of Oregon, 2016 William Mitchell Summer Research Funding, University of Oregon, 2015 Exploratory Grants, Hagley Museum and Library, 2015 Cum Laude, Seoul National University, 2009 PUBLICATIONS: vi Jeung, Yongwoo. “A U.S. Tripartite Experiment in the Kennedy Administration.” Polity 52, no. 1 (January 2020): 116-55. https://doi.org/10.1086/707026. Ki, Youn and Yongwoo Jeung. “Ideas, Interests, and the Transition to a Floating Exchange System.” Journal of Policy History 32, no. 2 (2020): 151-82. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0898030620000020 vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Professor Gerald Berk for his unwavering support for my long journey to complete this manuscript. Without his empowering laugh as well as his constructive criticisms, I would have left the manuscript unfinished and run away. I am also grateful to Professors Craig Parsons and Joseph Lowndes. The professors were willing to be critical but generous enough to remind me of the more important topics that I initially declared to address in my prospectus. My outside member Professor Daniel Pope, who was fully retired three years ago, decided to stay in my committee. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his sacrifice and brilliant comments. Dr. Intan Suwandi and her husband, Eli Bonner invited me to numerous dinners to feed me when I struggled to survive the last three months to the defense date. I sincerely thank them for their emotional as well as intellectual solidarity with me. Lastly, I want to thank my family. Despite my father’s prolonged illness, both of my parents encouraged me to go back to my work, and relieved me of family duties. And my wife, Eunduk, has been the strongest supporter of my project throughout the entire process. I relied on her whenever I got lost amid the daunting task. Her love raised me up whenever I hit the wall, utterly frustrated. I learned from her more than from anyone else in the journey. I owe her this dissertation and my degree. viii For my wife, Eunduk ix TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................... 1 Questions ............................................................................................................... 1 Scholarship on the American State ....................................................................... 3 A Non-Weberian Optimist Approach to the 1960s Policy Experiments .............. 14 Framework ............................................................................................................ 15 Layering .......................................................................................................... 15 Patchwork and Intercurrence .......................................................................... 17 Entrepreneurship ............................................................................................. 19 Methodology ......................................................................................................... 21 Order of the Dissertation ....................................................................................... 25 Chapter 2. A. U.S. Tripartite Experiment in the Kennedy Administration .... 25 Chapter 3. War on Poverty and Adult Training .............................................. 28 Conclusion ...................................................................................................... 32 II. A U.S. TRIPARTITE EXPERIMENT IN THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION ............................................................................................. 33 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 33 The Intractable Industrial Conflicts of the 1950s ................................................. 42 The New Deal Industrial Order under Stress .................................................. 42 Automation ..................................................................................................... 48 Experimentation: The Kaiser Tripartite Committee ............................................. 51 Embarking on a Tripartite Experiment in 1961 .................................................... 59 x Chapter Page The Politics of the LMAC ..................................................................................... 66 Epilogue and Conclusion: The Legacy of Failed Political Entrepreneurship and the Rise of Commercial Keynesianism after the LMAC Experiment ............ 84 III. WAR ON POVERTY AND ADULT TRAINING .............................................. 92 Introduction .......................................................................................................... 92 Previous research on the U.S. Welfare System and the War on Poverty ............ 105 Gøsta Esping-Andersen: U.S. Welfare System in Comparison ...................... 105 Margaret Weir: U.S. Labor Market Reforms in the 1960s that Failed ........... 107 Jill Quadagno: Race that made the American