The idea of this book grew out of lectures that I gave in the early 1970s at the AFL-CIO Labor Studies Center in Washington, DC, and at the University of Illinois Institute of Industrial Relations in Champaign, Illinois. The audiences were trade unionists (mostly local officers and shop stewards), and the subject was labor law and labor arbitration. The discussions were lively and the questions stimulating. I became aware that many people had an institutional incentive to learn about labor law, and I quickly realized that the existing literature was not reaching them; in fact there really was no book aimed specifically at such an audience. This impression was confirmed by a series of talks that I gave to similar audiences at the Institute for Industrial Relations at the University of California at Berkeley. My contact with corporate representatives at some of the institute’s functions made it clear that both sides of the bargaining table were interested in obtaining a basic outline of the labor-law system, one that would not be so encyclopedic as to be intimidating.

In the mid-1970s I began to lecture on American labor law to labor academics, American-studies specialists, trade unionists, employers, and government officials in various countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In most of these countries I was asked to recommend a book that provided foreigners with an outline of American labor law. My inability to recommend such a book finally induced me to write A Primer on American Labor Law. Structured seminars sponsored by the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. International Communications Agency in such countries as India and Brazil and lectures given under the auspices of the Kyoto American Studies Seminar helped organize my thinking for this book, as did some of my lectures to my Labor Law I classes at the Stanford Law School.