The National Industrial Recovery Act in Comparative Perspective: Organized Labor's Role in American and British Efforts at Industrial Planning, 1929–1933

In both the United States and Britain, the Great Depression generated widespread interest in the possibility of utilizing state power to foster the development of corporatist institutions to restore order and stability to economic life. However, whereas Britian made only piecemeal efforts to implement corporatist mechanisms in a few selected industries, the United States proved willing, at least temporarily, to implement a far more thoroughgoing experiment in corporatism—he National Recovery Administration (NRA). This article seeks to explain this divergence in American and British policy responses to the depression. While considering the extent to which differences in state capacities, ideology, political contingencies, and the structure of economic organization may have contributed to America's greater willingness to attempt a comprehensive experiment with corporatism in the early 1930s, this article focuses on the importance of the weakness of organized labor in the American—as opposed to the British—political economy as an explanatory factor in the divergent experiences of the two nations.