The Corporation as Family: The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890-1930
232
The Corporation as Family: The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890-1930
232eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Employing the critical lens of gender analysis, Nikki Mandell offers an innovative perspective on the development of corporate welfare. She argues that its advocates sought to build a new relationship between labor and management by recasting the modern corporation as a Victorian family. Employers assumed the authoritative position of fathers, assigned their employees the subordinate role of children, and hired male and female welfare managers to act as "corporate mothers" charged with creating a harmonious household. But internal conflict and external pressures weakened the corporate welfare system, and it eventually gave way to a system of personnel management and employee representation. With the abandonment of the familial model, the form of corporate welfare changed; but, as Mandell demonstrates, its content left an enduring legacy for modern industrial relations.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780807860397 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The University of North Carolina Press |
| Publication date: | 04/03/2003 |
| Series: | The Luther H. Hodges Jr. and Luther H. Hodges Sr. Series on Business, Entrepreneurship, and Public Policy |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
The Corporation as Family
The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890-1930By Nikki Mandell
The University of North Carolina Press
Copyright © 2002 University of North Carolina PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8078-5351-1
Chapter One
Redefining the Labor ProblemPrior to the advent of welfare work, employers had pursued one of two general strategies in their dealings with employees. Confronted with rebellious workers, an employer might look to the example set at Homestead in 1892. There, company management spent months preparing for an armed showdown with employees, stockpiling inventory and turning the factory into a defensible fortress. One Georgia textile manufacturer summed up this repressive approach to the labor problem when he told an interviewer that "in an acute situation where I had only men to deal with I'd just as soon get a gun and mow 'em down as not." In addition to violent confrontations, the repressive model included the use of company-paid spies to ferret out union organizers and sympathizers, the immediate discharge of those employees, blacklisting, and the yellow-dog contract. This antagonistic method incorporated more subtle strategies to solve problems of inefficient labor. Whether or not they engaged in outright repression of strikes and union sympathizers, most employers manipulated wage rates, work rules, and production processes in a concerted effort to force greater output from their workers.
By the turn of the century, public officials, the courts, and industry trade groups lent a degree of legitimacy to this strategy. In a practice reminiscent of 1877, for example, government troops broke the Pullman strike and boycott in 1894. At the same time, the courts became increasingly sympathetic to employer appeals for protection of property, issuing numerous antistrike injunctions after the mid-1890s. In 1903, the National Association of Manufacturers adopted an aggressive open-shop platform. Association membership accorded a degree of respectability to employers advocating the "big stick" solution to the labor problem.
Despite these sanctions, some employers turned to a tradition of benevolent paternalism to solve the labor problem. As far back as the founding of the Slater Mills in 1790, some employers proffered the carrot, rather than the stick, to ensure themselves an industrious, loyal workforce. Samuel Slater promised an education in the company's Sunday School to attract young farm boys to the new mill. Other textile manufacturers, facing similar labor shortages, developed more elaborate programs to entice hard-working, tractable workers to remote mill towns. Textile mills built in Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1820s and 1830s drew most of their workers from among the daughters of area farmers. Cheaper and less troublesome than men, women were an ideal labor force for the nation's first large-scale mechanized factories. However, manufacturers had to convince apprehensive parents that mill life would not strip their daughters of familial protection. Nathan Appleton, a founder of the Lowell Mills, recalled that in order to protect the virtue of their women workers the "most efficient guards were adopted in establishing boarding houses, at the cost of the Company, under the charge of respectable women with every provision for religious worship." Mill owners soon added a full complement of protective institutions-schools, hospitals and churches-to the boarding-house system.
Dependence on water and coal power forced many nineteenth century manufacturers, like the textile mill owners, to locate their plants far from towns. Isolated from established institutions, employers in company towns pioneered in providing for the physical and moral well-being of their workers. However, paternalism was not limited to company towns. Prior to industrialization, most apprentices and journeymen lived and worked as junior members of the master craftsman's family. As production with waged labor replaced the apprentice system in the nineteenth century, employers continued to claim some responsibility for their workers' welfare, especially when the employers' own welfare was at stake. Employers frequently tried to help both their employees and themselves by loaning money, counseling temperance, retaining aged workers on the payroll, or supporting benefit associations.
Henry J. Heinz, struggling out of bankruptcy in the late 1870s, regularly admonished intemperate employees for the harm they were doing to themselves. In 1878, he sent an intoxicated jellyman home, demanding that the man return only "when his head would be clear," and presumably when he would be able to make the jelly clear as well. Heinz's temperance campaign included a talk given in his home to all wagon salesmen. At the end he extracted a pledge from each not to drink.
Like Heinz, many nineteenth-century employers provided for their employees' welfare as a personal responsibility. Gerald Zahavi describes similar practices at the Endicott Johnson Company. For example, George Johnson often attended to injured workers and, when needed, fetched the doctor himself. Employers' wives played an important part in this system of benevolent paternalism. In the 1890s, Mrs. George Johnson taught sewing and domestic arts to local girls in her home. Mrs. Joseph Bancroft performed similar duties for the children of Bancroft and Sons Company employees, baking turnover pies for each of the fifty children in the company's town at Rockford, Delaware.
By the early 1890s, a number of employers began to question whether either method, repression or benevolent paternalism, would ever solve the labor problem. As continuing strikes and organizing drives demonstrated, workers showed no sign of being beaten into permanent submission. Large employers in particular began to find repressive strategies increasingly problematic. Aggressive anti-unionism opened the door to a public scrutiny that was damaging to both personal and corporate reputations. Nor were employers satisfied that they were extracting the most work possible from their employees. While mechanization gave employers a means of controlling the pace and quality of production, it raised the potential for costly slowdowns and sabotage by disgruntled employees.
Those employers who began to search for new strategies for solving the labor problem did so in an environment very different from the earlier ones that had fostered either the repressive or paternalistic approaches. Mechanized production and an expanding national marketplace were transforming the work experience dramatically. NCR's growth was admittedly spectacular. Still, the average workforce per plant more than doubled in size in most major industries between 1870 and 1900. While workforces numbering in the thousands were common only in the steel and textile industries in the 1880s, after 1900 numerous other industries, from meat packing to electrical equipment, employed thousands of workers per plant, and steel and textile workforces grew to the tens of thousands. New industries, especially the giant department stores and telephone companies, employed similarly large numbers of workers.
These larger workforces were called on to perform different kinds of jobs than were their predecessors. In some industries the demand for unskilled, and particularly for semiskilled, labor exploded. By the turn of the century, semiskilled operatives performed virtually all production jobs in the textile industry and were the fastest growing group in many other industries. Newer sectors of the economy, such as the department stores and the telephone and insurance companies, created new types of jobs. Combined with an expansion of bureaucracies within American business, retail and clerical jobs offered new options for women, who entered the workplace in ever greater numbers throughout the early twentieth century. Workers vying for jobs in this changing labor market, often seeking to protect skills or autonomy in the face of changing production processes, did not submit quietly to the new industrial landscape.
At the same time, the great merger movement of 1895-1904 resulted in the consolidation of one-quarter to one-third of the nation's manufacturing stock. Thousands of firms disappeared through mergers, leaving a small number of powerful corporations in many key industries. In a number of cases these mergers prompted increased labor activism, especially as unions struggled to protect hard-won recognition in the face of corporate efforts to consolidate power over both their markets and their labor forces. This was the underlying motivation for the 1892 lockout and strike at Homestead. A decade later, when the McCormick and Deering families, along with three other firms, formed the International Harvester Corporation, union organizers found sympathetic ears among workers at both the McCormick and Deering plants. In the wake of a 1903 strike at the Deering works, one investigator reported that "if William Deering had kept the business, the trouble would not have come, but the people say 'the Company has gone into a Trust; why should we not combine?'"
As at NCR, important changes in the relationship between employers and employees accompanied expansion of this magnitude. These changes affected the way many employers understood the labor problem. Small shop production in the mid-to-late nineteenth century generally entailed the employer's direct involvement in daily operations. While few may have been as persistent as Patterson, both his proximity to the factory floor and his supervision of production were typical of the era. However, as workforces and factory spaces grew, and as mechanized, mass production replaced made-to-order or small-batch production, foremen increasingly replaced owners as front-line supervisors. By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, employers in mass-production and mass-marketing industries had entrusted most aspects of daily operations to foremen. In addition to overseeing production itself, foremen generally hired, trained, and disciplined workers; they set the pace of work and frequently set wages as well. To the extent that foremen replaced employers as supervisors on the shop floor, workers remained subject to a highly personal and often autocratic control of their work lives.
Employers, however, experienced these changes differently. Over time, all but the smallest firms added layers of management between workers and employers. In some respects the expansion of the managerial hierarchy rivaled the growth of the wage labor force. While the numbers of wage-earners in manufacturing, mining, and transportation grew by almost 30 percent between 1910 and 1920, the growth among supervisorial employees exceeded 65 percent. By the early twentieth century, as many as four layers of managers might separate employers and employees in the largest American firms. Sitting at the top of the hierarchy, employers lost direct contact with their employees.
This separation was exacerbated further by the increasingly different tasks each performed. The executive of the modern firm devoted less and less time to daily operations, where contact with workers might occur. Instead, he concentrated on long-range planning and finance, often in home offices distant from the firm's many plants or in executive suites isolated from the shop floor.
Employers in rapidly expanding industries felt this loss of intimate contact with their employees in a number of ways. As lines of communication spread across layers of management, workers, like those on strike at Deering in 1903, were less inclined to balance their interests and needs with those of an infrequently seen employer. Equally troublesome, employers were not entirely confident that foremen transmitted either their orders or their employees' concerns very faithfully. Reporting on conditions at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in the aftermath of reforms in 1914, Ivy Lee noted that "the mine superintendents and petty bosses have all the faults of their kind and the Company has no assurance that its policies are being carried out."
The experience at NCR was typical. Despite a belief that his office door was always open, John Patterson had to admit that by the late 1890s a worker would have needed the "agility of a Rocky Mountain goat" to have reached him over the walls thrown up between subforemen, foremen, department heads, and the president. This loss of contact, he claimed, deprived the company of good ideas and left ambitious workers with little hope of recognition or advancement. While an expanded management hierarchy promised greater productivity by rationalizing business operations, the consequent loss of personal contact between employer and employee might also entail costs.
Employers searching for a new solution to the labor problem frequently cited the lack of personal contact with their employees as a new and serious problem to be remedied. Under present conditions of industrial production, noted a speaker at a 1902 conference on the labor problem, "there remains no longer the personal touch, and sympathy is lost in estrangement." In fact, nostalgia for a mythic golden past of close, caring relations between employer and employee tinged many turn-of-the-century accounts of the labor problem. As late as 1919, the president of an urban railway company attributed an unmeasurable loss of efficiency to the "failure to protect and continue in effect that close intimate relationship which obtained during the days of small organizations when the proprietor or general manager knew each man by his first name, was familiar with his family affairs, and had more or less first hand knowledge of the hopes and ambitions of each member of the organization."
A growing number of executives concluded that a reformed, humanized business system must overcome this lack of intimacy. Trying to recapture this familiarity through the benevolent paternalism of an earlier era was unrealistic. How could an employer provide a timely home loan to a hard-working employee if he did not even know he existed? How could he offer sage advice to a troubled worker he had never met? They needed, as one employer phrased it, a "personal contact mechanism" between themselves and their expanding workforces.
Beyond the changed environment inside the modern corporation, employers also confronted a new environment outside the factory walls. When the nation moved through the first industrial revolution and into the post-Civil War era, entrepreneurs had pointed to the invisible hand of market forces to explain the dynamics of American capitalism. Arguing that the American economy was open and competitive, businessmen claimed that concentrations of market power were the uncontrollable consequence of natural competition and that such concentrations of economic power need not be feared. The pursuit of one's personal interests, classical liberalism theorized, redounded to the benefit of all. Thus, the entrepreneur could be neither too greedy nor too successful in the competitive marketplace.
Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the American economy conformed less and less to the model of the classically competitive marketplace. With the rise of cartels, pools, trusts, and, eventually, integrated corporations, market control in many industries became concentrated in monopolies or in a handful of giant oligopolies. Concentrations of economic power no longer seemed to be the result of some invisible hand, but rather the consequence of active manipulation by corporate owners and financiers.
With increasing frequency, corporations found themselves subject to attack from journalists, academics, and politicians. Exposés of unethical business practices, shoddy or harmful products, and abhorrent working and living conditions shocked readers of popular magazines. A new generation of economists challenged the classical theory that unfettered pursuit of one's self-interest promoted the common good. Politicians, riding a groundswell of public outrage, frequently weighed in against the large corporation, as well. Corporate efforts to solve the labor problem took place in an environment that increasingly questioned the legitimacy of corporate power.
One progressive reformer summed up the situation: "The alert and intelligent member of the capitalist group is aware of the fact that he and his class are under surveillance today; that they are distrusted by many of the people, and that the situation demands, not an arrogant defiance of this irrational attitude, but an earnest effort to justify their place in the social organism." Business executives could hardly ignore these challenges.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Corporation as Family by Nikki Mandell Copyright © 2002 by University of North Carolina Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
What People are Saying About This
An engaging and well-documented analysis of both corporate and social structure in the US. . . . This appealing history will interest and benefit general readers and undergraduate and graduate students.—Choice
Provides a useful synthesis of the literature on corporate welfare and the development of corporate organization in the period. In addition, its careful treatment of the impact of gender ideologies on the emergence of middle management and subtle handling of welfare work should be of interest to scholars of business, labor, and women's history, class relations, and the history of professionalism.—American Historical Review
A sparkling and original contribution. . . . [Mandell] treats corporate welfare as a three-way rather than a binary relation, and she offers a thoughtful gender analysis of the whole project.—Journal of American History
[Mandell's] research is provocative and pushes the historiography of family, business, and reform in the early twentieth century in promising new directions.—Law and History Review
A lively portrait of the women and men who first sought to manage labor relations, adding a needed dimension to existing histories of management and contributing to a growing literature on gender and business.—Enterprise & Society
In this pathbreaking work, Nikki Mandell places corporate welfare workers rather than industrialists at the center of her story. In so doing, she moves well beyond usual treatments of corporate welfare programs as merely anti-union devices used by employers to undermine the legitimate grievances of their workers.—Joe William Trotter Jr., Carnegie Mellon University