Building Company Consciousness
The economic and political struggles between capital and labor in the 1930s and 1940s as we have seen, raised fundamental questions of power in society. Inside the factory, such challenges raised questions about who would make the critical decisions affecting hours, wages, and the conditions of work? Who would control the shop floor? Some labor leaders, such as Walter Reuther, raised the specter of codetermination of investment and pricing. As the historian Charles Maier has explained, the outside social and political environment had entered the factory. Managers in the postwar era, then, were increasingly expected to help shape national policies and values in order to restore their authority in the plant. A narrow focus on the company's concerns no longer seemed adequate.
Altering national economic and social priorities inevitably began with a struggle over the consciousness and loyalties of American workers. The rise of labor unions had mobilized workers around new and powerful loyalties. These unions, business leaders complained, had drenched the minds of workers "in a reckless propaganda of distortion, deceit, and phoney [sic] economics." Fearing that in the new loyalties of their workers lay threats to their control of the workplace and to the future shape of America itself, businessmen not only sought victory at the bargaining table and in the halls of Congress but also sought to win the hearts and minds of American workers. To accomplish this latter task, managers drew heavily upon such earlier mechanisms as human relations and welfarism. However, employers changed the character of these devices to serve a new purpose— to send a message that business had solved the fundamental ethical and political problems of industrial society, the basic "harmony between the self interest of our economic institutions and the social interests of society."
Control of the shopfloor was an important goal for postwar business. To cut costs and to restore the productivity necessary to meet rising consumer demand, employers developed several responses to the labor problem. A significant number of businesses, including those located in the sunbelt as well as companies involved in extremely capital-intensive, continuous flow production, like chemicals and oil refining, continued to resist unions. Alternatively, a small group of progressive employers, primarily in the garment and electrical industries, along with some smaller steel-making and fabricating firms, looked to union-management cooperation or accommodation as a means of gaining control over the labor force,*
The majority of large corporations, however, tended to take a moderate, "realistic" approach to industrial relations. They reluctantly accepted organized labor but hoped that an aggressive collective bargaining strategy would enable them to contain union power and achieve productivity goals. Contract negotiations in the auto industry that confined the scope of collective bargaining to wages, hours, and working conditions were the first steps in this direction. In 1948, General Motors proposed linking wage rates to increased productivity. At least at the national level, unions were to trade job control for periodic wage increases and benefits. The inclusion of no-strike clauses in postwar contracts and an increasingly elaborate grievance system were designed to ensure that union leaders shared responsibility with management to tighten up worker discipline and prevent interruptions to production. By 1950, the historian Howell Harris concludes, large corporations like GM, Ford, U.S. Steel, and Westing-house Electric had made significant progress toward achieving stable and efficient labor relations.
It is tempting to draw broader generalizations from the willingness of some corporations to concede higher wages and benefits. However, it neither signaled the formation of a "social contract" between capital and labor nor ended genuine conflict, as many historians have argued. Employer intransigence in the area of managerial prerogative had forced unions to give up some power, but the fight for economic security continued to galvanize workers for serious struggle. Only the threat of strong union action brought increased wages and benefits. Dramatic, long strikes in 1945-46 were necessary to allow labor to begin to catch up with wartime inflation. Furthermore, new benefits required sacrifices. Over half of the strikes in 1949 and 70 percent during the first half of 1950 were over health and welfare Issues, and General Motors' concession of pensions in 1950 came only after a longstanding UAW campaign for old-age security.
National collective bargaining agreements, moreover, did not put an end to an ongoing struggle to control the shopfloor. Quickly, the business community discovered the inadequacies of collective bargaining to solve all managerial problems. In late 1949, labor analyst Edward T. Cheyfitz observed that "Labor-management relations in America are continuing in the pattern of a power struggle. That is the outstanding fact characterizing industrial relations today." Local unions and management fought endlessly over the pace and organization of work. Seniority and grievance systems, which could at times stifle worker militancy, also placed substantial constraints on managerial discipline and personnel deployment. Even in plants where the collective bargaining system was weak and the union noncon-frontational, informal work groups served to challenge managerial authority. These cohesive units of workers, protected by the grievance system, stymied efforts to increase productivity through a variety of tactics, including informal bargaining with foremen, slowdowns, work-to-rule campaigns, and wildcat strikes. 8
Continuing conflict evoked two sharply divergent interpretations within the business community. A small core of moderates accepted as inevitable the idea that significant differences of interest and social philosophy separated employees and management. Business leaders like Paul Hoffman of Studebaker, Robert Wood Johnson of Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals, and Meyer Kestenbaum of the garment firm Hart, Schaffner & Marx recognized organized labor as legitimate representatives of workers' interests. They believed that unions served as the channel and instrument, but not source, of worker protest and discontent. Dependent upon each other for survival, unions and management needed to find a way to overcome their differences. "We must develop a relationship between management and union which is neither based on the assumption of permanent industrial warfare, nor on the equally false hope that we can eliminate all the conflicts within enterprise," asserted railway executive Charles R. Hook. Instead, we must, "find a way to make the conflict itself constructive and fruitful. Collective bargaining was a workable, practical, and democratic vehicle for resolving conflicting interests. Through the collective bargaining process, progressives hoped to make the union an "integral part of a program of teamwork, communication and participation. "11
For progressive employers like Robert Wood Johnson, no contradiction existed between workers' loyalty to both company and union. He observed that life "is full of multiple loyalties which can be adjusted by common sense."12
Similarly, a Raytheon Company executive contended that employees could have "dual loyalties, just as a foreman must have loyalty to his employees as well as to the management. This duality need not present serious conflict or create adversaries." Workers could be promanagement and pro-union at the same time. Continuing conflict, then, simply symbolized the expression of divergent opinions and perspectives. When capital and labor achieved mutual accommodation of their legitimate differences then industrial peace would become a reality. Industrial relations profes-sionals applauded and encouraged this vision of labor relations.
Most conservative businessmen, in contrast to the small core of liberals, had a harmonious, consensual vision of society. To them, no inevitable conflict existed between labor and management. Workers and management were partners in a community of interest directed by employers. Thus, in 1946 industrial relations expert E. Wright Bakke found that managers viewed employees as "'our men/ not workers in general, not members of the union," and certainly not organized labor. We are all workers, declared NAM President Wallace F. Bennett in 1949, "we are all capitalists." Employers, not unions, were the natural allies of workers, and yet, Bennett continued, "we have allowed our detractors to put over on us their symbols, with certain words spelled with capitals to spell out classes which compartmentalize us. "16
The detractors, of course, were typically trade unions. Unions had successfully challenged the business leadership of American society during the Depression. In the postwar years, labor was expanding the scope of that challenge in the workplace, especially in the modern, mass production factories that seemed so hierarchical, rigid, and alienating. Businessmen felt that unions were responsible for an "artificially created" ideological chasm between employers and their workers. Labor's collectivist philosophy and its challenges to managerial authority exacerbated the problems inherent in the labor process and contributed to continuing turmoil on the shop floor. Labor relations consultant Martin Dodge accused unions of poisoning the minds of workers with a "barrage of irresponsible invective, false economics, distorted statistics, and general accusations that front offic-es are largely filled with a conspiring coterie of lying leeches.
Particularly galling to business leaders was a 1950 Harvard Business Review article by Solomon Barkin, director of research of the Textile Workers Union, which asserted that a fundamental conflict existed between workers and management. The source of this conflict was the helplessness of the individual worker in the face of the economic and social power of the employer. Unions, representing work-
ers as a group, empowered employees, fulfilling their aspirations and reflecting their needs. Accordingly, Barkin contended, the worker's primary loyalty was to the union, not the firm. NAM managing director Earl Bunting, challenged Barkin's assumptions, asserting that approaching industrial relations "on the basis of mass and class is repugnant to our ideals," for the United States has "attained a classless society which other countries dream of." He declared that trade unionists had finally shown their true colors with Barkin's "frank and open acceptance of the class conflict approach. "20
Yet there appeared to be ample evidence that large numbers of workers accepted Barkin's interpretation of class relations. Opinion polls concluded that many workers distrusted their employers and doubted the virtue of the free enterprise system itself. Surprisingly large numbers of workers favored government ownership or control of the economy and even greater numbers wanted governmental guarantees of economic security. In 1946, the Psychological Corporation found that 43 percent of surveyed workers believed they would do as well or better if American manufacturing firms were run entirely by the government. A 1950 Opinion Research Corporation sample of industrial workers found that over 30 percent believed that the government should control prices and limit profits, 26 percent wanted to see the government limit salaries of top executives and 21 percent would vote for government ownership of four key industries. 21
The same workers who trusted the government had little faith in management's concern for their welfare. Attitude surveys reflected a rejection of the traditional managerial philosophy that individual effort rather than collective action led to success and advancement. As a result, skeptical, group-minded employees were suspicious of employer appeals for greater productivity. Fifty-eight percent of manual workers surveyed by ORC responded to a call for increased effort, with the answer: "That's the SPEED UP. Means they want more work for the same pay." A similar number rejected the idea that workers benefited from increased productivity, and over a third of these workers believed that labor-saving machinery destroyed jobs. 22
Polls demonstrating that over half of American workers believed that corporations earned profits topping 25 percent each year alerted industrialists that significant economic misunderstandings clouded the relationship between worker and employer. "No partnership can be expected to work very well," Henry Ford II told United States Chamber of Commerce in 1947, "when 75 percent of industry's employees think stockholders and top management of corporations take more out of business than employees." In reality, according to the automaker, industry profits averaged less than 5 percent and employees received almost six times as much as the amount paid to stockholders.
Employers believed that these negative attitudes toward the American economic system intruded onto the shop floor. Workers who felt that they only received the "crumbs" had little incentive to work hard. Within this context traditional managerial complaints about low productivity assumed a new, more ominous significance. In 1946, 73 percent of executives surveyed by Mill and Factory blamed "a general indifference on the part of the workers" as the prime cause of declining labor productivity. Similarly, American Thread Company executive Guy B. Arthur, Jr., noted that employees, who "years ago were as regular as the sunrise," routinely skipped work or produced as little as necessary, feeling no obligation to "trade a fair day's work for a fair day's pay." Part of the problem, continued Arthur, was that the worker no longer accepted responsibility for his security, expecting "the government to take care of his future." Most disquieting, however, was the "subordination of the individual to the group" as workers relied on seniority rather than ability or merit for advancement. 5
Across the spectrum of business associations, leaders awakened to the dangers a misled working class posed to each firm as well as the future welfare of America. By exploiting employer silence, organized labor was winning the battle for the loyalty of workers, which enabled increasingly powerful unions to undercut business influence. Management, declared General Foods president Austin S. Ingleheart, "has left open a wide hole through which its adversaries are driving half-truths and falsehoods." In a 1949 article, associate editor of Factory, M. J. Murphy, described the results of employer reticence to challenge unions at every level. Continuing union power over the shop floor, he charged, was gained primarily through ideological manipulation of employees. Organized labor's ability to limit output through its influence over the work force threatened the economic viability of every firm. 7 The labor columnist Victor Riesel admonished businessmen at the 1950 NAM convention, "You are not competing [effectively] for the creditability of your company with your working people, and I say that with the rush to the left, you will get washed aside in the years to come."
In response to these warnings, particularly after the 1948 election, business mobilized to protect its interests by selling the free enterprise system in its factories. More than creative collective bargaining was needed to gain worker acceptance of the business agenda and thereby thwart the power and influence of unions on and off the shop floor. A large segment of the business community responded to the ideological and economic challenge posed by unions by attempting to create a separate company identity or company consciousness among their employees. This involved convincing workers to identify their social, economic, and political well-being with that of their specific employer and more broadly with the free enterprise system. A company conscious worker, rather like the idealized boy scout, was not only productive but also took pride in his job and demonstrated loyalty and allegiance to the firm. One component of company consciousness drew from the insights of human relations. Through human relations, managers planned to gain the willing cooperation of workers in expanding productivity and to restore "the natural and sincere friendship that should exist" between worker and employer.
* * *
The origins of the human relations theory of management are well known. It developed from the Hawthorne experiments conducted by the sociologist Elton Mayo and his Harvard Business School associates beginning in the mid-1920s and from the theories published by the psychologist Abraham H. Maslow during and after World War II. The Hawthorne researchers discovered the influence that informal work groups exerted over worker behavior and productivity. Informal organization grew out of the employee's social needs, the desire for recognition and dignity, as well as the natural camaraderie of the shop floor. Using these insights, sociologists challenged the dominant managerial ideology that treated workers simply as a source of labor driven by economic incentives. Instead, each worker needed to be treated as a "social being related to others in a complex social organization." Increased productivity depended on securing the cooperation of the small work group through participation in decision making, better communication, and improved supervisory training, and by providing employees with greater social and psychological satisfaction on the job.
In an influential article published in 1943, Maslow contributed a more sophisticated understanding of motivation to human relations. He identified five sets of needs, including physiological, safety, affection, esteem, and self-actualization, or accomplishment. When the most basic drives were satisfied, they no longer motivated behavior. Drawing on Maslow's findings, social scientists in the field of human relations contended that employers could not depend on higher wages alone to substitute for fulfilling the entire range of workers' needs. They linked employee discontent and falling productivity to the failure to meet workers' higher needs on the job and asserted that these problems couid be alleviated only through the enhancement of the social aspects of the workplace.
Mayo's and Maslow's work had great appeal to the business community. Like many employers, Mayo assumed that company and employee formed a community that reflected homogeneous interests. Conflict was not natural but simply the result of misunderstanding. If management could gain the cooperation or control of the informal groups of workers then the need for trade unions would disappear. The flood of social science literature on these topics provided "scientific" verification that collective action was not a natural phenomenon. Reflecting this interpretation, General Foods vice president Thomas G. Spates argued that the "militancy and the crusading spirit of the labor movement" was nurtured by the "failure of management to satisfy the non-economic needs" of workers. Demands for higher wage rates were simply an expression of worker discontent at their firm's failure to meet their higher needs. Fulfilling such noneconomic wants was the key to Industrial peace in the factory and beyond.
Practical application of human relations theory in the firm grew slowly. Even before the Hawthorne experiments there had been some discussion but little sustained effort to improve morale and supervision. But the rise of industrial unionism during the thirties and the demands of wartime production triggered experimentation with employee morale and job satisfaction. What employees thought about their company assumed a growing importance in the context of the broader contention over national economic and social priorities. Companies conducted attitude surveys, initiated counseling programs, and began instructing foremen on the application of human relations supervision.
The postwar labor crisis widened the audience for human relations. One scholar notes that after 1946 "the managerial conviction that problems of human relations were important knew virtually no bounds. That same year, Henry Ford II asserted that one of the greatest problems confronting American industry concerned "human relationships—relationships which can either aid or impede our ef-forts to achieve greater industrial efficiency. Fowler McCormick, chairman of the board of International Harvester Company, predicted more devastating results if managers continued to overlook the human element, contending that "the very existence of American industry depends on the success of its human relations." Unless the people of this country believe in Industry, he continued, "American industry will not last.
By the late forties, human relations became the dominant managerial theme. Commitment to human relations transcended the divisions within managerial ranks. With its promise of winning worker loyalty to the firm, it touched a responsive chord among both nonunion employers and those unionized employers committed to containing the scope of industrial relations. Its potential to enhance productivity, however, also attracted more moderate employers. Courses, bulletins, and even national meetings devoted to human relations reflected its widespread appeal. In 1952, Time pronounced that a second industrial revolution, "quieter but more profound, is sweeping through U.S. industry; its name: Human Relations in Industry." The new corporate mottos were "understanding" and "togetherness." In 1948, Cloud Wampler, head of Carrier Corporation, for instance, determined that "happy relationships shall prevail between the Corporation and its employees." The central goal of the movement was to reforge a personal relationship between each worker and the company by appealing to his or her nonfinancial, social needs.
Getting workers to believe in industry was intimately connected to the operation of the shopfloor. Human relations oriented personnel administration emphasized effective supervision in the belief that worker identification with the firm and possibly with the free enterprise system itself was intimately linked to the employee's relationship with their supervisor. Following the war, many firms increased the size of their supervisory force and negotiated reductions in the number of stewards to strengthen foremen's shopfloor leadership. Supervisory training programs proliferated as firms like GE, Armstrong Cork, Alcoa, and Ford sought to increase the prestige, effectiveness, and loyalty of their foremen whose status had been severely shaken by the rise of industrial unionism. A few firms had initially offered these courses after World War I and during the late thirties to combat rising unionism. Employers also offered foremen greater job security and established a sharp differentiation between supervisors and the rank and file by placing foremen on salary, inviting them to special meetings and dinners, and giving them offices and special parking privileges.
Supervisory development promised to boost the foremen's ability to serve more effectively as the first line of defense against unionism. This appealed both to large nonunion firms and unionized companies committed to a realistic approach to industrial relations. Courses taught foremen how to use their own personality to develop discipline and instill loyalty among workers. They were instructed to compete with the union steward for worker allegiance by personally greeting each employee every day and by providing a sympathetic ear for on-and-off the job problems. In 1947, General Electric, for instance, attempted to strengthen supervisory-employee relationships by establishing fifteen thousand cells of five to twenty-five people grouped around a single supervisor. The corporation urged foremen to find out what each employee "likes and dislikes about his job, what he thinks we can do to help him have a job and a personal association with us that is more rewarding materially and spiritually." The NAM praised these efforts, arguing that the ability of workers to confide in their supervisor "builds confidence in and loyalty to the company."
Participation, another fundamental concept associated with human relations, also promised to wrestle the loyalty of workers away from the unions. The Hawthorne studies had demonstrated that allowing workers to participate raised morale and productivity by promising to address employees' higher needs through making work more meaningful. The goal of postwar participation programs was to "make workers feel they are participating" without restructuring work or the line of authority within the shop.
In some firms, participation involved increased use of conferences during which supervisors "consulted" with employees on decisions that affected them. Management thereby aimed to "get workers to accept what management wants them to accept but to make them feel they made or helped to make the decision." More commonly, employers relied on suggestion programs to secure greater employee involvement. Suggestion systems enabled employers to gain greater access to workers' knowledge of the work process by giving employees a direct monetary reward for ideas on how to cut waste, eliminate unnecessary motions or prevent safety hazards while making the employees feel that the company was interested in their ideas. Although they dated back to the 1880s, it was not until the postwar era of human relations that suggestion systems began to flourish. Ford Motor Company, for example, established an employee suggestion plan in 1947 as part of its new human relations effort. By 1953, four thousand firms received more than 2 million ideas from workers and paid out over $15 million in return. The National Association of Suggestion Systems, organized in 1942 by four companies to promote suggestion programs, had grown to a membership of over a thousand firms twelve years later. 5
Companies frequently had to counter worker complaints that rewards were too meager or that labor-saving suggestions might lead to job loss. Elaborate contests offered one way to overcome such resistance and raise the level of worker involvement. In 1949, Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company conducted a five-week campaign devoted to waste reduction suggestions. It doubled awards and held weekly drawings for merchandise prizes. A "villainous looking hunchback named Weasel Waste" roamed through the plants criticizing good work and praising any waste he observed. During 1956, "Mr. Check" strolled daily through the Westinghouse Columbus plant tapping employees on the shoulder and giving them five silver dollars if they successfully answered three questions on improving quality. Sylvania's 1952 "Operation Sharp" contest stressed group spirit to improve worker performance in the areas of safety, housekeeping, reduction of scrap, and product improvement. The company publicized the campaign with streamers, posters, floats, a circus parade, and the crowning of "Miss Sharp" before an audience of twelve thousand. To ensure fullest participation, the contest divided workers into groups named after college football teams, which competed in various categories, for a grand prize of a three-day luxury weekend in New York City. 47
As all of these activities attest, human relations systems trumpeted the company's sincere and personal concern for the individual employee. Name plates, awards for long service, birthday greetings and merit awards provided individual recognition and acknowledged that the most menial job, however minor, was important to the company. 48
One manager whose company began sending birthday cards in 1946 attested that: "One of my men is going around walking on air, saying that for the first time in thirty-five years with the company he has been recognized as an individual rather than a cog in the machine. He says that birthday card is worth more to him than a ten dollar bill."49
Firms like the Frigidaire division of General Motors, Union Carbide and Carbon, and 3M provided dinner at a hotel, flowers, music, and entertainment to honor employees "who have proved their worth and loyalty over a long period of years." To enhance the worker's prestige in the community, many companies broadcast service award ceremonies over local radio stations or released pictures to local newspapers. 50
Firms that employed large numbers of women believed that these kinds of activities were especially important. Their approach, however, reflected the gender relations of the dominant culture and served to reinforce its assumptions. Hughes Aircraft stressed making women feel at home at work, encouraging supervisors to act as a "hand-holder" when necessary. Other employers believed that it took little more than a "big mirror, perfumed soap, hot water" and an occasional kind word to "keep the girls happy." The GE Schenectady Works' paper featured women's contributions to the plant by focusing on the "Woman of the Month." In other firms, however, recognition was based more on women's physical attributes. Standard Oil held beauty contests while McDonnell Aircraft Corporation plants annually elected a Sky Queen to reign over company activities.
Although human relations included improving personnel management through supervisory training and participation, the most intriguing aspect of human relations for postwar employers was direct communication with their workers. To get the people on the shop-floor to believe in industry, managers relied on a sophisticated, if politically loaded, understanding of communications, a key to building "company consciousness." Effective communications would help fulfill workers' higher needs by giving them a "sense of 'belonging' in the plants where they work" and by creating a new kind of coop-erative interaction between employer and employee.
Companies earlier had used various communication techniques to forestall unionization in the decades before the New Deal." The passage of the Wagner Act, however, made this an unfair labor practice. For a decade employers found their communications restricted. In 1947, the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act brought employers greater freedom of expression within their firms. J. P. Woodard, Director of Industrial Relations for the Johns-Manville Corporation, observed that "perhaps the principal advantage granted to the employer by the new Act lies in the opportunity for top management—directly, through management authority channels to convey its opinions and advice to all employees." Within months of the law's passage, Modern Industry observed that companies were "taking the offensive against the attacks made upon the American economic system by the Commu-nists and by their propagandists within the unions.
The National Association of Manufacturers, established communication conferences and clinics around the country. Other groups, including the Chamber of Commerce and local employer associations quickly followed suit. Between 1948 and 1950, the NAM conducted a thousand clinics and distributed thousands of communication manuals. The Employers Association of New Jersey in promoting its NAM co-sponsored communications clinic emphasized the importance of communicating with workers, pointing out that sixty million people in this country spend nearly half of their waking hours under management's collective roof; next to their families, most of them are more interested in their jobs than in any other subject. They are the same people who vote, who join unions and who use your products. And what the people who work for you think about you and your company largely determines their opinions about industrial management as a whole, and consequently about the amount of economic freedom under which they think you should operate.
In 1953, the Association established a special task force devoted to increasing the quantity and quality of information available to em-ployees. Its efforts in this area continued through the 1950s.
The Chamber of Commerce's work meshed with that of the NAM, sponsoring 227 meetings during the first eight months of 1950 alone. Each organization also issued monthly newsletters devoted to communications transmission, complete with ideas, suggestions, and case histories. In 1956 Champion Paper and Fibre Company produced a film focusing attention on the importance of communication to happiness and well-being. The story was placed in an industrial setting and dramatized how a communication failure at the top of the firm led to misinformation and misunderstanding among the employees. As one of the characters of the film pointed out, solving communication problems suggested "the basic answer to every problem is mutual understanding, from how to get along with your wife to international peace." More than six hundred prints of Production 5118 circulated among firms like Du Pont, Ford, IBM, and International Paper Company.
Reflecting the growth of the movement, private management communications consultants emerged, offering to design tailor-made programs for firms. The Employers Labor Relations Information Committee (ERLIC), formed in 1953, convinced managers at such firms as B. F. Goodrich, GE, Ford, Westinghouse, Standard Oil, Sears, Monsanto, Kennecott Copper, United States Steel, and Goodyear that it could design programs to draw "the corporate family together." ERLIC promised to win the "emotional allegiance" of a client's workers and aid companies in overcoming the "songs of class struggle and fear" emanating from unions. It asserted that the failure of employers to correct misunderstandings propagated by labor was the cause of most shopfloor conflict and the reason for America's drift toward "alien ideologies.
The antidote was direct communication with the individual worker. In reducing the influence of unions, nothing was more important than reaching the individual. The biggest mistake a company could make, according to Ford's John Bugas, was to conflate the individual employee with the union. Similarly, William B. Given of American Brake Shoe declared: "We must stop thinking of them as union members, or as a group, and think of them as individuals." Accordingly, in 1950, Ivan Willis, International Harvester's vice president for industrial relations, vowed we are finished with the idea of letting unions tell our story to our people. We are going to do that for ourselves and we are going to do it in competition with a union or any other agency which attempts to do it. We recognize the rights of a union as the employees' spokesman, their lawyer if you like, on a specific topic. But we do not consider our employees the union's employees. They are our employees. We are attempting to establish a relationship directly with our people so that regardless of what union they belong to... our story will reach our people consistently and continuously.w
Herman Steinkraus, president of Bridgeport Brass bluntly declared that while an employee may belong to the union, he "belongs to the company first."
Firms bombarded their workers with pamphlets, comic books, posters, bulletin boards, letters home, company annual reports, magazines, newspapers, films, and even matchbooks. In 1949, for instance, General Motors became the first company to install information racks in its plants. It distributed 7 million pamphlets in a single year. By 1958, three thousand companies utilized reading racks. But the mainstay of communication was the employee magazine. Some of these publications dated to the Progressive Era, but many were discontinued during the thirties. The postwar campaign to build company consciousness sparked the revival of this medium of communication. The number of titles multiplied more than six-fold in the 1940s, reaching more than 80 million employees. So fast was the growth that universities began offering training for company editors and several professional journals appeared.
The messages management communicated had two interrelated parts. The first part was a timeless industrial message concerning managerial authority and worker morale. Moderate as well as conservative employers portrayed the individual firm's financial position, operations, products, and problems to give employees a feeling of closeness to the firm. Explanations of the significance of each operation to the finished product were designed to help create a sense of purpose, pride, and dignity even among those frustrated by subdivided and alienating labor. Moreover, information about the company was to clarify for workers the mutual aims and shared interests of the employee-company family.
In 1946 the NAM spent over three million dollars on a public relations campaign to end price controls. Reprinted from Trends in Education, May 1946; courtesy of Hagley Museum and Library.
This typical N A M advertisement explained the importance of profits in the A m e r i c a n economic system. R e p r i n t e d f r o m American Magazine, M a r . 1948; courtesy of the National Association of Manufacturers.
The Advertising Council's economic education campaign, begun in late 1948, emphasized that the solution to America's economic problems was not radical change but expanded productivity through mechanization and increased efficiency. Reprinted from Time, Jan. 3, 1949; courtesy of the L T V Corporation.
Organized labor charged that business used its control over the mass media to sell not only its products but its ideology. Reprinted from CIO News, Feb. 17, 1947; courtesy of the George Meany Memorial Archives.
General Electric, a leading advocate of human relations in industry, bar-raged its employees, their families and neighbors with books, pamphlets, cartoons and articles in plant newspapers promoting corporate profits. R e p r i n t e d f r o m General Electric Commentator, M a r . 3 , 1950; c o u r t e s y o f the General Electric Company.
On opening day of the Quaker Oats Company's "I'm Gonna Holler about Taxes" campaign, letter-writing stations were set up throughout the Cedar Rapids, Iowa, plant, and employees were encouraged to write their representatives in Washington urging support for legislation reducing the tax burden. Reprinted from Public Relations Journal, Oct. 1953; courtesy of Cedar Rapids Gazette.
Boeing Airplane's Fishing Derby was part of the recreation program run by Boeing employees with the sponsorship of management. The 1952 contest was so popular that over five thousand employees participated in a ticket drawing from which fifteen hundred contestants were selected. Reprinted from Recreation, Feb. 1953.
Concerned that few employees understood their tax burden, DuPont dramatized the impact of "hidden taxes" in the company journal. Reprinted from Better Living, Mar.-Apr. 1952; courtesy of the DuPont Company and Hagley Museum and Library.
Olin Industries, which produced Winchester Arms and Ammunition, sponsored an extensive array of recreation activities for their employees' children. Not surprisingly, rifle clubs were the featured activity. If the guns were too big for the children, employees sawed off the barrels. Reprinted from Industrial Sports and Recreation, Feb. 1954.
Summer picnics featuring free T-shirts, hot dogs, soda, games, and prizes helped build employee and family identification with the company. Reprinted from Industrial Sports and Recreation, Feb. 1954.
UAW Local 600 responded to Ford's human relations campaign by advising workers to dump company communications into specially marked trash cans in each department. Reprinted from Ford Facts, July 3, 1948; courtesy of the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
In this cartoon, the UAW lampoons Allis-Chalmers' mandatory economic education program. Allis-Chalmers' workers filed grievances, complaining that "forced listening" was a violation of their rights. Reprinted from United Automobile Worker, Jan. 1950; courtesy of the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Visiting sick members was one way UAW Local 200 of Windsor, Canada, helped build loyalty to the union. Reprinted from Ammunition, Feb. 1949; courtesy of the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
Organized labor directly competed with corporate welfare capitalism by sponsoring recreational activities. The UAW promoted recreation as a vehicle for breaking down racial barriers between workers. Olga Madar Papers; courtesy of the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University.
