Mohawk Valley formula

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The Mohawk Valley formula was a corporate plan for strikebreaking to discredit union leaders, frighten the public with the threat of violence, use local police and vigilantes to intimidate strikers, form puppet associations of "loyal employees" to influence public debate, fortify workplaces, employ large numbers of replacement workers, and threaten to close the plant if work is not resumed. The Mohawk Valley formula was described in an article by company president James Rand, Jr., and published in the National Association of Manufacturers Labor Relations Bulletin in the fourth month of the strike. The article was widely disseminated in pamphlet form by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) later that year.


[edit] The "Mohawk Valley formula"

The June 1936 issue of the NAM's Labor Relations Bulletin immortalized the "Mohawk Valley formula" as a classic blueprint for union busting. The nine-point formula, as devised by James Rand, Jr., is as follows:

  1. When a strike is threatened, label the union leaders as "agitators" to discredit them with the public and their own followers. Conduct balloting under the foremen to ascertain the strength of the union and to make possible misrepresentation of the strikers as a small minority. Exert economic pressure through threats to move the plant, align bankers, real estate owners and and businessmen into a "Citizens' Committee".
  2. Raise high the banner of "law and order", thereby causing the community to mass legal and police weapons against imagined violence and to forget that employees have equal rights with others in the community.
  3. Call a "mass meeting" to coordinate public sentiment against the strike and strengthen the Citizens' Committee.
  4. Form a large police force to intimidate the strikers and exert a psychological effect. Utilize local police, state police, vigilantes and special deputies chosen, if possible, from other neighborhoods.
  5. Convince the strikers their cause is hopeless with a "back-to-work" movement by a puppet association of so-called "loyal employees" secretly organized by the employer.
  6. When enough applications are on hand, set a date for opening the plant by having such opening requested by the puppet "back-to-work" association.
  7. Stage the "opening" theatrically by throwing open the gates and having the employees march in a mass protected by squads of armed police so as to dramatize and exaggerate the opening and heighten the demoralizing effect.
  8. Demoralize the strikers with a continuing show of force. If necessary turn the locality into a warlike camp and barricade it from the outside world.
  9. Close the publicity barrage on the theme that the plant is in full operation and the strikers are merely a minority attempting to interfere with the "right to work". With this, the campaign is over—the employer has broken the strike.[1]

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ As quoted in Rodden, The Fighting Machinists: A Century of Struggle, 1984.

[edit] See also