BLS Daily Report: "The number of work stoppages hit an all-time low in
1999, with only 17 reported, BLS said. The 17 work stoppages amounted to
half the number reported in 1998 and the lowest since BLS started keeping
records in 1947. In the early 1950s, the high point of work stoppages,
nearly 500 stoppages a year idled workplaces. The previous low was in
1997 when BLS reported 29 stoppages."
Timothy Fogarty: "Under active lobbying from business leaders, the
U.S. Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. This legislation
constrained the spread of union organization especially in its
designation of certain union activities as unfair labor practices. In
addition, in the early 1950s, unions were placed on the defensive by
allegations of communist infiltration. These developments stunted much of
the momentum that had previously fostered the growth of unions. After
1955, labor relations were increasingly subdued as union power waned."
Stuart Ewen: "The 1930s and then the 1960s were periods in which the
challenge to the business system became widespread. If you want to see the
flowering of corporate public relations strategies look at the decade
following those periods. After World War Two a kind of gung-ho corporate
public-relations strategy tries to present the private business system as
the quintessence of the American Way -- a kind of commercialistic
rendition of democracy. This became almost a national ideology used to
roll back policies and ideas that came out of the 1930s New Deal -- for
example, the very idea that government might compete with business by
providing public housing. In the 1960s people began to wonder if democracy
was being violated by a destabilized business system. In the 1970s and
1980s, with the triumph of Reagan and Thatcherism, there comes to fruition
a set of national public relations strategies catalyzed by the political
issues of the Sixtes."
On page 308 of _PR!: a social history of spin_, Ewen mentions the Public
Relations Advisory Board of the National Association of Manufacturers. The
board was responsible for developing the "American Way" public relations
counter-offensive against the labor policies of the New Deal.
In 1938 the board was made up of representatives of major corporations,
among them McGraw-Hill Book Company. McGraw-Hill also ran a regular public
relations forum. A report on the forum in the October 1939 Public Opinion
Quarterly (p. 704-709) makes it clear that the labor issue was an over
riding concern.
After the war, in 1946, the McGraw-Hill Book Company published _The
American individual enterprise system, its nature, evolution and future_
written by the Economic principles commission of the National Association
of Manufacturers. Since the turn of the century, the Association had put
"educating public opinion" high on their agenda and has produced much
"educational" literature. Also, as Philip Wright wrote in the 1915
Quarterly Journal of Economics article, "It endeavored to interest the
college world in its propaganda. . ."
Roger Burlingame's 1959 corporate bio of McGraw-Hill, _Endless Frontiers_
gives a fascinating account of a species of textbook marketeers called
"college travelers" that expanded rapidly with the advent of the G.I. Bill
after the end of World War II. The traveler's job was to go from campus to
campus talking to faculty, showing them the M-H textbooks in their field,
sounding them out about what they are teaching, what they are writing
about, what they need in a textbook, coaching the young faculty on how
they might make their output more saleable.
Tom Walker
