Chapter Four provides a deeper analysis of two of the values tied to productivity: free enterprise and collaborative labor relations. While contradictory, these two values allowed corporations and business associations on the one side and labor unions on the other side to support the Productivity Program. US executives and business associations, such as the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) and the National Management Council (NMC), rallied behind free enterprise, meaning freedom from government and union influence in the domestic setting and free trade and freedom from cartel agreements in the international setting. US businesses organized countless European visits to the United States, and opened their factories to allow for first-hand experiences of American productivity; they also organized a signature project of the Productivity Program, Project Impact, which brought almost 300 top European industrialists to the United States for factory visits, and the First International Conference of Manufacturers in December 1951. Labor unions, by contrast, rallied behind collaborative labor relations, the concept of plant-level collective bargaining with the mutual goal of increasing a company’s competitive position through higher productivity, based on ideas developed by Clinton S. Golden and Harold Ruttenberg. Union officers enrolled as labor advisers in the Productivity Program’s administration, and their participation lent the program legitimacy in the eyes of European labor.
Remington Rand, “Efficiency is the Lubricant (1953)
Part of the Productivity Program was to create European study groups that would visit manufacturing plants of several different industries, so that they may study production sites and share in a learning experience…
NAM, Proceedings of the First International Conference of Manufacturers (1951)
While various members of the business community all saw the value of free enterprise, they disagreed on exactly how such an economy should function. These disagreements came to light at the First International Conference of Manufacturers in New York on December 3rd-5th of 1951…
Clinton S. Golden, “Presentation to the ECA” (1949)
Collaborative Collective Bargaining was a concept strongly pushed by Clinton S. Golden and Harold Ruttenberg in their book, Dynamics of Industrial Democracy…
Productivity Machines 