The system of American labor law and industrial relations has strengths and deficiencies. Because American society is litigious and dynamic, and because labor law will evolve and change in the coming years, the deficiencies may receive greater attention. The area of public-interest labor law will continue to grow rapidly. It may be that the legal struggle against discrimination will convince the courts and legislatures that protection against arbitrary treatment by employers for all workers is good policy and good law. The difficulty thus far has been that neither labor nor business has had an adequate incentive to promote legal safeguards for unorganized workers who are not protected by union-negotiated collective bargaining agreements. The developments alluded to in Chapter 11 that provide new protections for individual employees by virtue of both common law and statutes promised to fashion innovations in the workplace, notwithstanding the isolated indifference of the organized sector of the economy.

More changes may result from the willingness of unions to accept seats on corporate boards, as has been done in the automobile industry. This is bound to promote reexamination of the adversary-relationship model so widely accepted, until recently, by labor and management in this country – the view expressed by the Supreme Court in Insurance Agents that collective bargaining is not some “academic search for truth.” The current economic climate, inextricably linked as it is to the scarcity of and uncertainty about critical resources, has focused American attention on means of achieving cooperation as an adjunct to, if not a substitute for, conflict. The success of Germany and Japan in this area may be of interest to Americans. China, with a system only now developing, will occupy attention as well in the years to come.