Les tribunaux du travail. by Gerard Dion; Emile Gosselin; Rene H. Mankiewicz; Gerard Picard;Andre Desgagne; Marc Lapointe; Jean-Real CardinReview by: Alexandre BerensteinIndustrial and Labor Relations Review, Vol. 15, No. 4 (Jul., 1962), pp. 571-572Published by: Cornell University, School of Industrial & Labor RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2520402 .

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BOOK REVIEWS 571

manageable size, but it is regrettable that no cases involving such critically impor- tant issues as arbitrability, subcontracting, job classifications, and incentive pay and piece-work plans were included.

Stone has done a commendable job of suppressing personal value judgments as to how he might have decided the cases in question had he himself been the arbi- trator. Also, in summarizing decisions by different arbitrators on nearly identical issues with differing results, Stone is al- ways politely circumspect in noting that Arbitrator X, had he been presented with Arbitrator Y's case, might have decided it as did Arbitrator Y, although it appears that the two entertain divergent views of similar if not identical problems. He is also prudently aware that his own sum- maries may not do justice to all the rel- evant circumstances entering into the arbitrator's actual decision. In fact, Stone has succeeded to a remarkable degree in making his case summaries so objective and his statement of the parties' conten- tions and the arbitrator's reasoning so tersely clear that one who has arbitrated himself necessarily becomes envious of such economy of expression without loss of clarity.

Notwithstanding the excellence of the summaries, the reader will frequently find himself wishing that he had the full text of the arbitrator's decision before him. On critical issues of contract interpreta- tion as well as on controverted factual sit- uations, there is no adequate substitute for the full detailing of the relevant cir- cumstances and arguments, followed by the arbitrator's complete reasoning. One must add in all honesty that, in some cases, even this is not sufficient to pro- vide proper insight.

The foregoing remarks suggest the prin- cipal value and also the chief limitation of a book such as Stone's. Its value lies in acquainting both the student and prac- titioner of contract administration with a wide variety of currently significant problem areas and the manner of their resolution by arbitrators. The limitation is that summary analyses, no matter how carefully and expertly prepared, are not an adequate substitute for the decisions themselves. Such analysis may also un- wittingly create the impression of a greater

degree of consistency (or diversity) than in fact exists among practicing arbitrators on many key issues.

HAROLD W. DAVEY

Professor of Economics Iowa State University

of Science and Technology

Les tribunaux du travail. By Gerard Dion, Emile Gosselin, Rene H. Mankiewicz, Gerard Picard, Andre Desgagne', Marc Lapointe, Jean-Real Cardin. Quebec: Les Presses de l'Universite Laval, 1961. 162 pp. $3.

This volume comprises the report of a conference organized by Laval University in April 1961. The sixteenth annual con- ference took as its subject "The Labor Courts." The province of Quebec does not itself have any labor courts, but their establishment has been urged for a long time and was one of the points of the Liberal party's program, the party now in office.

Professor Emile Gosselin sets forth in his article, "Nature et raisons d'etre des tribunaux du travail," the reasons why it is advisable to exclude labor problems from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts: the nature of these ordinary courts, their traditional method of opera- tion, rules of procedure, their long delays and often prohibitive costs. Similar com- plaints can be raised concerning the "quasi"-judicial powers of various admin- istrative bodies. What is required is the establishment of specialized courts whose members would be competent in both juridical matters and the substantive issues concerned.

Mr. Rene Mankiewicz deals with "Ex- periences etrangeres." As is well known the oldest labor courts, the "conseils de prud'hommes" in France, date back to the nineteenth century. We do not think that it can be said, as the author claims, that these councils play a limited role; they deal with 50,000 cases a year and, since the judiciary reform of 1958, they are normally the courts which deal with individual labor cases. In most other countries the employer's and workers' judges do not sit alone but under the chairmanship of a professional judge. The author, wishing to demonstrate the use-

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572 INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS REVIEW

fulness of courts specializing in labor problems, refers to various old decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States (and especially that of Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 1923) which failed to consider economic, industrial, and so- cial conditions that a labor judge could not have ignored.

Mr. Jean-Real Cardin, of the Univer- sity of Montreal, covers "Le particularisme et l'esprit propre du droit du travail." Leaving aside the specific problem of labor courts to examine labor law as a whole, he discusses the characteristics which make labor law a special branch of law; with regard to the formation of the contract of service or relationship of service, their contents and termination, the general rules of the law of contracts are subject to numerous exceptions. He contends that labor law calls for fresh thinking with respect to collective bar- gaining.

In addition to the contribution of Mr. Gerard Dion, director of the Department of Industrial Relations at Laval, who ex- plains the development of the problem, there are pieces by Mr. Gerard Picard on "La juridiction des tribunaux du tra- vail," by Professor Andre Desgagne on "Composition et regles de procedure des tribunaux du travail," and by Professor Marc Lapointe on "La place des tribunaux du travail dans l'ensemble de l'organisa- tion judiciaire." The volume also includes a draft law establishing labor courts in the Province of Quebec drawn up in 1940 by Professor Marie-Louis Beaulieu.

ALEXANDRE BERENSTEIN Dean, Faculty of Law University of Geneva Geneva, Switzerland

LABOR ECONOMICS

Measuring Company Productivity: Hand- book with Case Studies. By John W. Ken- drick and Daniel Creamer. New York: National Industrial Conference Board, 1961. 110 pp. $12.50.

The authors underestimate the appli- cability of this monograph in addressing its arguments only to the company exec- utive, on the benefits of measuring pro- ductivity, and to the company economist,

on the methods and techniques of meas- urement. Although the book is primarily for those who would be interested in and working with company productivity fig- ures for their own sake, it contains at least two important concepts for the econ- omist who wishes to test hypotheses con- cerning the relationship of factor returns to productivity movements.

In the first place, the economist is warned against using partial productivity changes as a criterion for factor price movements. He received the same warn- ing in Kendrick's, Productivity Trends in the United States, and while it is true that its impact in this monograph is weakened by the form of its presentation - almost a verbatim repetition (see Pro- ductivity Trends, p. 7, and this work, p. 33) -the frequency with which it is ignored excuses its restatement. How many more studies relating wages to out- put per particular factor-input must ap- pear which forget the fact that the gain in total, not partial, productivity meas- ures the permissible non-inflationary in- crease in returns per unit factor-input, and that all gains in efficiency cannot be imputed to an individual factor?

The book's second element of impor- tance to the general economist relates to implications for more refined measure- ment of broad productivity changes. To measure improvements in national pro- ductivity by averaging individual industry gains, it is necessary to deflate the total change by the degree to which gains re- sult from shifts among industries, from low to high productivity industries. Were account taken of the movements within industries, of production shifts from low to high productivity companies, the meas- uring of total productivity changes would be made more accurate. Kendrick and Creamer do not suggest this useful by- product of company productivity studies, and truly there are limits to the distilla- tion of productivity data. Nevertheless, should more companies follow the tech- niques of productivity measurement out- lined in this book, more accurate measures of particular industries, and consequently, national averages could be found.

In their desire to emphasize to com- pany executives the benefits of measuring productivity, the writers have probably

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