With the end of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson was able to turn his attention once again to the domestic front where, wrote Scheinberg, “peace on the home front was threatened by class antagonism.”
Hoping to smooth labor-management relations and avert a looming steel strike, on September 3, 1919, the president called together a National Industrial Conference “to discuss such methods as have already been tried out of bringing capital and labor into close co-operation, and to canvass every relevant feature of the present industrial situation, for the purpose of enabling us to work out, if possible, in genuine spirit of co-operation a practicable method of association based upon a real community of interest which will redound to the welfare of all our people.”
The conference took place on October 6, 1919, in the Pan-American building in Washington, D.C. The participants were divided into three groups: the general public, labor, and management. The A.F.L. represented labor; the National Industrial Conference Board, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Investment Bankers Association represented management. The public group, headed by Bernard Baruch, included an eclectic mix of distinguished Americans—John D. Rockefeller, Jr., was one of them.
During the conference, Rockefeller sided with the labor and public groups against the management representatives by supporting the concept of collective bargaining. But ultimately, the majority of the management participants refused to accept any type of collective bargaining and the delegates from the A.F.L. withdrew from the meeting. Nonetheless, President Wilson called a second Industrial Conference for December of that same year to try to find a way to encourage peaceful bargaining between management and labor. Composed primarily of the public group of the October conference, it was presided over by Herbert Clark Hoover, who also supervised the writing of its final report.
“Their report contained concrete proposals for the organization of labor-employer relationships from the factory to the national level,” wrote Scheinberg. “There seems to have been an almost deliberate avoidance of even the mention of unions in the report, but this was understandable. They were trying to construct a system that would be satisfactory to most American employers and at the same time fit the needs of American workers. Their plan had to account for the fact that most American workers were not organized. Thus, their only concession to trade unionism was a provision for the workers having ‘free, prompt, and unrestricted choice of such representatives,’ which presumably included union representation.
“For the local level, the council advocated employee representation or company unions. Hoover said later that this was considered ‘a step toward progress in collective bargaining.’ The plan featured a national industrial board and regional conferences to bring labor and capital together at all levels. Provisions were made for voluntary mediation, but compulsory arbitration was rejected. These proposals of the second conference were never realized. The employers who were ready to accept employee representation had already, for the most part, done so.…
“The success, between the first and second conferences, of the United States Steel Company in defeating a strike probably strengthened the resistance of many employers to innovations in the labor field. Then too, there was not the same concern for worldwide revolution that had existed just after the armistice, and so the conference proposals fell on less concerned ears.”
The year 1919 also marked the formation of the Special Conference Committee, a network of representatives from leading American industrial organizations who periodically met to discuss and propose labor policies. Alfred C. Bedford of Standard Oil of New Jersey, Owen D. Young of General Electric, and Charles Schwab of Bethlehem Steel were the primary organizers of the committee, which also included representatives from Dupont, General Motors, U.S. Rubber, Goodyear, Westinghouse, International Harvester, and the Irving Trust. The top executives of these companies met once a year, but their personnel officers assembled each month to discuss business concerns.
From 1922 until his death in 1951, the secretary to the committee was Edward (Ned) S. Cowdrick, a former newspaper reporter who had covered King and Rockefeller’s work at CF&I and who replaced Clarence J. Hicks as assistant to the president at that company when he left. “Then, under the title of ‘a consultant in industrial relations,’ he gave full time to his Special Conference chores,” wrote Scheinberg. “Communiqués to the member companies were issued on Cowdrick’s letterhead, and committee offices and phones were listed in his name.” Ultimately, this anonymity-seeking confederation of business leaders came to be called the Cowdrick Group.
During the 1920s, the members of this group developed the notion of welfare, or “people’s capitalism,” emphasizing “the stake of the worker in the system, and the inter-relations of labor and capital,” wrote Scheinberg. They also led in the development of the new field of personnel management by supporting the American Management Association.
The general public did not know about the Special Conference Committee/Cowdrick Group until the LaFollette Civil Liberties Committee of the U.S. Senate looked into it as part of its investigation of trusts and monopolies in the late 1930s. The members of the committee denied that they acted in unison to set corporate policies, and ultimately the committee was cleared of all suspicions. But thereafter the CEOs no longer met, although others on their staff did.
Copyright © 2001, 2006 by Industrial Relations Counselors, Inc. All rights reserved.