He was also arbitrator and impartial chairman of various United States labor-management committees, and a member of numerous government boards on industrial relations disputes and economic stabilization.
Though primarily a labor economist and later an academic dean at Harvard University, Dunlop carried out advisory roles in every U.S. Presidential Administration from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Bill Clinton.
[4] In 1958, he brought together his scholarly work on wage determination with applied experience in dispute resolution in his seminal book Industrial Relations Systems.
[5] The book proposed a model of how an "industrial relations system" brings together product market, regulatory, and technological factors with the institutional practices of labor and business to produce wages, benefits, and other workplace outcomes.
In the 1930s-50s, students included academics who became prominent industrial relations specialists, labor historians, and labor economists, including Irving Bernstein, David Brody, Morris Horowitz, Mark Leiserson, William Miernyk, Herbert Northrup, Jean Pearlson, Martin Segal, Jack Stieber, Lloyd Ulman, and Donald White.
His students in the 1960s—80s went on to distinguished careers in labor and health economics, including Katharine Abraham, Kim Clark, Peter Doeringer, Richard B. Freeman, Jack Hirshleifer, Carol Jones, Garth Mangum, Daniel Quinn Mills, Joseph Newhouse, Michael Piore, James Scoville, Paula Voos, Michael Wachter, and David Weil.
He collaborated with many other academics in a variety of fields including Frederick Abernathy, Derek Bok, Ray Goldberg, James Healy, Larry Katz, Clark Kerr, George Shultz, and Arnold Zack.
An unnamed colleague told reporter Daniel Q. Haney of the Associated Press that Dunlop is "more at home with a plumbers' convention than with the Harvard faculty.
[8] He played significant roles in the early days of the Harvard Kennedy School, and served as the acting director of its Center for Business and Government from 1987 to 1991.
During a critical period in its history following the police bust in 1969 and subsequent shutdown of the university, Dunlop played a crucial role in restoring stability to the institution, leading a student faculty committee through a process to resolve the conflict and ultimately to introduce governance reforms.
[12] Because of its centrality in setting wages and benefits in a climate of military mobilization, limited resources, inflationary pressure, the NWLB's staff and leadership received a rapid-fire introduction to the problems and challenges confronting hundreds of enterprises.
From 1943 to 1945, Dunlop held the post of Chief of the Research and Statistics Branch of the NWLB and the experience helped him develop his fact-finding approach to resolving disputes.
Derek Bok, former President of Harvard University, commented in 2003 that Dunlop "... was the last surviving member of a small group of people who came of age during World War II who had the respect of both business and labor.
Dunlop focused on a variety of efforts that sought to bring the idea of multi-party problem solving to the regulatory process, and in implementing labor policies.
His views on the importance of government policy in fashioning agreements among parties rather than through direct regulatory authority were laid out in his article "The Limits of Legal Compulsion".
In that article, Dunlop notes: The country needs to acquire a more realistic understanding of the limitations on bringing about social change through legal compulsion.
A great deal of government time needs to be devoted to improving understanding, persuasion, accommodation, mutual problem solving, and information mediation.
In agriculture, he intervened in an eight-year-old dispute between the Campbell Soup Company, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC, an AFL-CIO affiliate that organized farm workers in the Midwest) and tomato growers in Michigan and Ohio regarding conditions of work among the migrant workers who worked for growers supplying Campbell's with tomatoes.
Eventually Dunlop's and Abernathy's efforts led to the creation of the Tailored Clothing and Technology Corporation [TC]2, a government-business-labor organization, funded cooperatively the three parties.
[TC]2 is discussed in the Commentary of Dunlop, Industrial Relations Systems, Revised Edition (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1993), pp. 36–37.
Following a growing number of disputes and walkouts among police and firefighters in the 1970s, Dunlop mediated an agreement between police and firefighter local unions, an association of municipal governments, and state legislators on legislation to create a tri-partite (labor, public management, with an impartial third party chair, nominated by the two sides and appointed by the Governor) dispute resolution body to handle collective bargaining problems in the sector.
[19] Dunlop produced a considerable body of articles, books, reports, and scholarship, with his work Industrial Relations Systems (1958) regarded as his biggest achievement.
Many arbitrated disputes for the biggest firms and unions in the country and chaired government boards, and as time passed the leading figures in the field were appointed to be the presidents and deans of the nation's most prestigious universities – Berkeley, Ann Arbor, Wisconsin, Harvard, Columbia, Northwestern, Princeton.
One became the leading liberal in the U.S. Senate (Paul Douglas), another the Watergate Special Prosecutor (Archibald Cox), another the Secretary of State (George Shultz).
Drawing on his training in economics and his own industrial relations system framework and his insistence on having the parties agree on a common set of facts, he helped establish both a theoretical and a practical method of resolving problems and creating institutions for their ongoing evolution.