The records of the Conference Board are an important source for understanding the business community's response to most political and socioeconomic issues.
Transcripts of the NICB's monthly meetings and Yama Conferences contain descriptions of routine businesses that were transacted as well as addresses by prominent business leaders on the economic and political issues of the day. Of particular interest are the debates over labor-management relations, union recognition, employee benefit plans, the New Deal, and the growing role that the state played in regulating the economy. Debates at annual meetings often described conditions in various industries, most notably automobiles, chemicals, textiles, and rubber. Other issues discussed included: research and development, atomic energy, unemployment compensation, right-to-work laws, industrial mobilization, unemployment compensation, World War II mobilization, the Marshall plan, and civil defense.
Executive Committee minutes document election of officers, selection of topics for NICB reports, relationships with associated trade associations, estimates of revenue and expenses, and discussions of new member applications. The records also document the relationship between the Conference Board and the various state associations of manufacturers.
Correspondence with affiliated organizations consists of letters to and from the various trade associations that are members of the Conference Board. Most of the correspondence concerns fund raising, elections of officers, and the recruitment of new members.
The subject files, from the office of presidents Magnus W. Alexander (1916-1930) and Virgil D. Jordan (1931-1965), document the Conference Board's industry studies. They include fragments of survey data, as well as some final reports. A full series of Conference Board reports is housed in Hagley's Imprints Department. Also included are files from the Committee on Industrial Relations (1917-1920). These files contain correspondence of Walter Drew with various Conference Board members and document the efforts to draft a labor policies program, with comments by Drew, Emery and various Conference Board members. The files include survey information on the following subjects: employee absenteeism, compulsory arbitration, bank credit, industrial relations and personnel practices in various industries, holiday practices, group insurance, and workers' compensation.
The surveys on corporate organization were primarily conducted in the 1970s, as the Conference Board sought to compile data on organizational structure and directors' compensation in the Fortune 500 companies. These records include copies of staff, personnel and policy manuals, as well as organization charts, for America's largest firms. Many of the files include copies of company annual reports. Also included are data on corporate financial structure, cost ratios, and marketing costs. They describe corporate strategies for raising capital and the effects of inflation, recession, and federal budget deficits on capital availability.
The National Industrial Conference Board was established in 1916 by eleven of the United States' major trade associations. The employer representatives attending the NICB's founding convention were seeking to formulate a collective response to the industrial unrest of the World War I era. In its original statement of purpose the NICB claimed that it intended to work to maintain "harmonious relationships between employer and employees and between both labor and government." Even though many of NICB's founding members were affiliated with the "open shop movement" they were by 1916 willing to sit down with the American Federation of Labor and discuss issues of common concern. These included industrial safety, vocational training, and unemployment. The NICB was divided over the issue of union recognition and therefore avoided taking a position on collective bargaining. However, Magnus Alexander, the NICB's first president, who spent many years as a personnel officer with General Electric, believed that the trade union movement had become a permanent fixture in American life and that employers should attempt to increase their bargaining power by organizing themselves into trade associations and affiliating with organizations like the Conference Board.
The Conference Board operated on the basis of consensus and voluntary agreement. If a representative of a member trade association did not agree with the organization's stated positions, they were free to oppose them. The NICB was, therefore, able to embrace the twin banners of employer unity and labor reform. Beginning in 1916, the NICB began holding annual meetings which became known as Yama Conferences, since the first was held on the Yama farm in New York State's Catskill region. At these meetings, NICB members discussed economic and social issues of the day and attempted to develop a consensus which would define the organization's positions.
As part of this process the NICB's staff experts began to compile a number of economic and sociological reports on contemporary issues. Ther first of these, completed in 1917, focused on the structural weakness of the workmen's compensation laws and on health and social insurance. Over the years the NICB became a spokesman for the so-called progressive wing of the business community. As part of its ongoing function as a lobbying group and publicist for American business, it produced hundreds of research reports on economic and social issues facing the United States.