Kaufman to be Honored by Labor and Employment Relations Association

Georgia State University Professor of Economics Bruce Kaufman will be honored early next year by the national Labor and Employment Relations Association for his lifetime of work in the field of human resources and industrial relations.

As one of the first five inductees into the group’s Association of Fellows, Kaufman joins leading industrial relations scholars in LERA’s hall of fame. The award will be presented at LERA’s annual conference in San Francisco on Jan. 4.

“The initial award winners were people we thought have made the biggest contribution to the field,” said Morris Kleiner, the AFL-CIO Chair in Labor Policy at the University of Minnesota and the chair of LERA’s award selection committee.

Kaufman, who has been at Georgia State for 31 years and plans to retire in 2009, spent his career studying industrial relations. He is perhaps best known for his work chronicling the history and development of industrial relations practices and human resource management. His most recent book is “Managing the Human Factor: The Early Years of Human Resource Management in American Industry” (Cornell University Press, 2008).

Kaufman is also the recipient of the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies’ 2008 Teaching Award.

He says while some aspects of human resource management have changed over the past century, the basic principles are largely the same.

“You’re trying to get the best workers at the lowest cost you can and get more productivity,” said Kaufman, who is also a senior associate at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business’ W.T. Beebe Institute of Personnel and Employment Relations.

Other inductees into LERA’s Association of Fellows include:

Richard Freeman, the Herbert S. Ascherman Professor of Economics at Harvard, known for his work on unions.
Thomas Kochan, the George M. Bunker Professor of Management at MIT’s Institute for Work and Employment Research, known for work exploring the changing labor relations environment.
Francine Blau, the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Economics at Cornell University. She’s known for work on gender discrimination in the U.S. and abroad.
Arne Kalleberg, the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kalleberg is also a past president of the American Sociological Association.

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