Headquartered at the School of Labor and Employment Relations at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the organization has more than 3,000 members at the national level and in its local chapters.

LERA is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that draws its members from the ranks of academia, management, labor and "neutrals" (arbitrators and mediators).

Past presidents of LERA include John T. Dunlop, George Shultz, and Ray Marshall, all of whom went on to serve as U.S. Secretary of Labor.

LERA promotes full discussion and exchange of ideas between and among all of its constituencies—academic, labor, management, neutral, and government—on the planning, development and results of research in these fields, as well as its useful application in both practice and policy.

The association assumes no partisan position on questions of policy in these fields, but is an open forum respecting all opinions and perspectives.

In 1999, the organization moved its headquarters to the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Paula Wells became the executive director.

It originally consisted of about 100 researchers (economists; management, human resources, and labor relations researchers; attorneys, historians and sociologists) from 30 universities, including California-Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Illinois, Massachusetts (several campuses), MIT, Michigan, Michigan State, Northeastern, Rutgers, Stanford and UCLA, as well as universities in Canada and the United Kingdom.

Ultimately, EPRN realizing its mission means to contribute to healthier and more productive lives of American workers and their families, to promote general economic prosperity and to enable the nation to compete successfully in the global economy.