Abstract
In the 1940s, Alfred Marrow and the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation played a key role in laying the foundations of participative management. Concurrently, they were also accused of being antitrade union. These accusations resurfaced in the 1960s with the publication of five articles in Trans-Action, which were initiated by William Gomberg, a former International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) official. This paper examines those articles and Gomberg's relationship with Harwood. It draws particular attention to the “a role reversal in the running of factories” whereby Harwood sought to democratize many of its practices by giving some control to workers, whilst the ILGWU sought to act more like an employer by taking on the industrial engineering role of managers in determining methods and times for jobs. The paper concludes that there is little evidence of antitrade unionism, there was a clash between Harwood's worker-centered approach to industrial democracy and ILGWU's industrial engineering-centered approach.
Keywords
Introduction
The Harwood Manufacturing Corporation, led by Alfred J. Marrow for nearly 40 years, is seen as having played a key role alongside Kurt Lewin in laying the foundations of organization development (OD; Burnes, 2004, 2007, 2019).
As Dent (2002, p. 272) observes of the “Harwood experiments”: Although this comprehensive effort is much less well-known than the Hawthorne studies, the research which came out of it has perhaps had a greater impact on group decision-making processes, self-management, leadership development, meeting management, stereotyping and resistance to change, among others.
Marrow was not just a successful businessman who championed participative management, but also an academic, management consultant, public servant, social campaigner, prolific public speaker, and friend of leading figures in public life (French, 1979; Highhouse, 2007; Marrow, 1974). In the 1960s, he was also Chair of the New York City Commission on Intergroup Relations, later renamed the Commission on Human Rights. As French (1979, p. 1109) noted in his obituary of Marrow: He was first and foremost a man of action who was most successful in applying the Lewinian methods of action research to problems of managing organizations and reducing prejudices.
For many years, both authors of this article had been aware of the Trans-Action articles and Gomberg's accusations, but had found it difficult to square these with what we knew about Harwood and Marrow. Burnes first came across the Trans-Action articles sometime in the early 2000s. As someone familiar with the history of Harwood and the work of Marrow, he found the evidence did not seem to support Gomberg's claims that they were antiunion. Indeed, in the period in question, Lewin and Marrow worked with a wide variety of individuals and institutions, including “labor and management representatives” (Lewin, 1946, p. 201). It would seem strange that if Marrow was antiunion, he and Lewin should be approached for help by trade unions.
Burke encountered the Trans-Action articles when they were first published in 1966. Like Burnes, he found it difficult to equate what he knew of Marrow with Gomberg's assertions. He worked with Marrow during the late 1960s and early 1970s when Marrow was Chair of the Board of Directors of the National Training Laboratories (NTL Institute) and Burke was a senior professional staff member there, and was even offered the post of NTL President by Marrow. From 1952, the NTL was part of the National Education Association (NEA), which is the largest education union in the US. It was and still is the view of Burke that Marrow was not antiunion. Indeed, not only would it be bizarre if a large trade union, such as the NEA, allowed one of its constituent parts to be chaired by someone who was antiunion, but also—given the history and progressive philosophy of the NTL—it would be very strange if it allowed someone with an antiunion stance to occupy such a central position (Bradford, 1967; Freedman, 1996). For Burke, Marrow was someone devoted to promoting and enabling participative management to everyone everywhere, regardless of whether they were union members, managers, community activists, or whatever.
The above, of course, are the authors’ personal views, backed up by quite extensive knowledge of Marrow and Harwood. In seeking to explore the issues raised by Gomberg, especially the vehemence directed at Marrow, we were frustrated by a lack of evidence regarding the relationship between Harwood and the ILGWU. In an endeavor to progress our research, we sought to find out more about Gomberg, but though at the time we looked at the available literature and contacted a number of other academics, we found very little useful information. 2 Then, unexpectedly, in 2019, one of the people whom we had earlier contacted about Gomberg sent us a copy of a speech by Gomberg (1951a) 3 that threw a new light on the ILGWU's relationship with Harwood and, especially, his unique role in the Union. This led us to realize that in seeking to understand Marrow and Harwood's stance on trade unions, we had only been looking at one side of the equation. To understand the relationship, we needed to look at both sides. In examining the ILGWU, we came to pay particular attention to its views on industrial democracy and its practice, led by Gomberg, of providing and promoting industrial engineering services, that is, time and motion studies, to its members’ employers. In comparing Harwood with the ILGWU, we began to see what one senior union officer described as “a role reversal in the running of factories” whereby the union tried to take over some of the duties usually carried out by management (Tyler, 1995, p. 140). The result was that whilst Harwood sought to democratize many of its practices by giving some control to workers, the ILGWU sought to act more like an employer by taking on the role of managers in determining methods and times for jobs. The following paper explores and explains this further.
The paper begins by examining the five Trans-Action articles. It then looks at the history of Harwood's relationship with trade unions. This is followed by an examination of Gomberg's role in the ILGWU and its use of industrial engineering. The paper then compares the somewhat strange juxtaposition of Harwood's participative approach to work design and rate setting with that of the Union's “role reversal” in trying to impose their own time and motion approach on workers.
The paper concludes by arguing that the evidence does not support the case that Marrow or Harwood was antiunion per se. In terms of the clash between Gomberg and Marrow in Trans-Action, we argue that this did not concern the recognition of trade unions or even a personal dislike for each other. Instead, it was fundamentally a clash between Harwood's democratic-participative approach to management and the ILGWU's views on industrial democracy. In practice, the clash was between whether workers should be directly involved in making decisions about what they do and how they do it, which Marrow advocated, or if their union on their behalf should determine these through its application of the “scientific” principles of industrial engineering. We also point out that this paper emerged from slow, persistent, and painstaking scholarship conducted over many years, which challenges the “publish or perish” mantra that seems to infuse most universities.
The Gomberg–Harwood Exchanges
In 1946, the ILGWU became the first and only union at Harwood since its move to Marion in 1939. In the first year after unionization, relations between the union and Harwood's personnel manager, Lester Coch,
4
seemed to have been a little tense, but after he left in 1948 and was replaced by Gil David, Gomberg (1966c, p. 48) comments that “satisfactory relations with the union” were established. However, in 1966, a series of five short articles were published in the journal Trans-Action that again raised Harwood's attitude to trade unions. The authors were:
William Gomberg, Professor of Industry at the University of Pennsylvania. In the 1940s, he was Director of the Management Engineering Department of the ILGWU and was involved in the unionization of Harwood. Warren Bennis, Professor of Industrial Management at MIT and a pioneer in the field of leadership whose core message was that “organizations require not autocrats at the top, but leaders with more humanistic, democratic styles” (Kirby, 2014). Alfred Marrow, President of the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation. … our corporate heads are assigned the task of economic performance, not emotional rehabilitation. … Benevolent autocrats operating within a competitive institutional framework seem to provide the most effective combination of economic achievement and political restraints. Industry's democrats have confused a benevolent paternal style of velvet-gloved autocracy with democracy. He was very provocative. He was a dialectician who challenged his students. He was a feisty type. He was not middle-of-the-road. Whatever he believed in, he believed in strongly. He believed in collective bargaining. (Kerper, 1985, p. 16) Gomberg (1966a, p. 32) also takes aim at the Harwood experiments and describes how the factory “was organized [unionised] in a record short time,” but he does not mention his own role in this or indeed his relationship with the ILGWU. Gomberg (1966a, p. 32) does though observe that: The details of the [Harwood] experiments which were going on reveal that what the management called “worker participation” was experienced by the group [Harwood employees] as manipulation. This explained the readiness with which the group embraced the union. It is clear that Gomberg (1966a, p. 32) has a strong antipathy to the Harwood experiments, which he observes have been “referred to in the literature ad nauseam.” That a trade union official might have a dislike for a particular company is understandable. That he should still strongly hold onto that dislike some two decades after the company was unionized in a “record short time,” and a decade after he left the Union to move into academia, does seem somewhat strange. This is a point we will return to later in the article.
Bennis (1996a)
In addition, Bennis maintains that what Gomberg (1966a, p. 33) appears to claim as a direct quote from the Coch and French article, that is, that “democratic participation by the workers in decision making is a valuable managerial instrument to improve production,” does not appear in the article. Bennis (1966a, p. 36) also states that “Nor will he [Gomberg] find words that even imply that ‘conclusion.’” Overall, the thrust of Bennis's article, though delivered in polite terms, is that Gomberg is somewhat cavalier with the facts and makes misleading claims. Normally, having given Bennis a right of reply, the exchange would end at this point. However, Trans-Action offered Gomberg a further opportunity to put forward his views and then, in the same issue, for Alfred Marrow to have his say. In assessing my evaluation of the Harwood experiment, Bennis hinges his entire argument on the implication that since an agreement existed between the union and the management as of December 31, 1946, the union was a party to the experiment and the workers enjoyed due process. In conclusion, Marrow (1966, p. 56) states that: Thus the Harwood experience runs completely counter to Gomberg's postulate that “corporate executives are judged by economic performance, not the emotional well-being of their employees.” To us the two overlap; many of their components are organically interdependent. At least in terms of the postulates that we have come to call group dynamics, they can be treated as coming under one heading and shaping into one design. My contention from the beginning has been that the Harwood management and associated behavioral scientists were not consciously and deliberately manipulative, but just unperceptive.
The exchange took the form of an initial opinion piece by Gomberg, followed by a response from Bennis in the same issue of Trans-Action. Gomberg then replies to Bennis in an issue of Trans-Action that also contains Marrow's response to Gomberg's original article. The correspondence finishes two issues later with a rejoinder to Marrow from Gomberg. Though Bennis's article is measured in its response to Gomberg, the tone of both Gomberg and Marrow's contributions is less than cordial, especially in relation to each other. For example, Marrow (1966) accuses Gomberg of creating a “fantasy” and Gomberg (1966c) accuses Marrow of indulging in “Orwellian double talk.” The following briefly summarizes the five articles in chronological order:
This is a curiously damp squib ending to the exchange of views between Gomberg, Bennis, and Marrow, given that Gomberg used the term “manipulation” eight times in his first article, giving the impression that he does consider participative management as a tool that companies use consciously to manipulate workers. However, the entire exchange is curious. Why, after so much time has elapsed since Harwood was unionized, do Gomberg and Marrow seem so antagonistic to each other and each other's position?
In considering the relationship between Harwood and the ILGWU, two points should be noted. Firstly, given the often volatile and sometimes violent nature of union–management relations in the United States, including the garment industry (Tyler, 1995; Zinn, 1980), the unionization of Harwood was almost a genteel affair. There may have been some early antagonism between the Union and Lester Coch, but after his departure, a normal union–employer relationship seems to have been established, according to Gomberg (1966c). Secondly, though the articles can be interpreted as showing signs of personal animosity between Gomberg and Marrow, there is no evidence they ever met. It follows that other factors may be at play and, as we will show, the antagonism may have more to do with the nature of the Harwood and the ILGWU's approach to industrial democracy rather than anything else. To explore this further, the next two sections will examine Harwood's stance on Trade Unions and the ILGWU's use of industrial engineering.
Harwood and Trade Unions
In looking at Harwood's relations with trade unions and whether this might explain the somewhat fractious exchange between Gomberg and Marrow, there are five points to note.
Firstly, Harwood does not appear to have been inherently opposed to trade unions or historically had bad relations with them (Burnes, 2019). Indeed, as the following extract from a letter dated 31 January 1936 to the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) from Isidor Marrow (Alfred's father) testifies, relations seem to have been quite amicable in the years before Harwood moved to Marion: … we sincerely appreciate the kind and helpful cooperation we have received from Mr Herman and Mr Lavelle [ACWA officials] … It is just cooperation such as this kind that makes for a better and more sympathetic feeling between employers and employees …
7
I have discussed with Mr Herman in New Bedford last week the possibility of moving part of our plant to some other location. He sympathised with the motivation which impelled us to a decision of this sort, but suggested that I discussed the matter with you. I explained that I would be very glad to do so. If, therefore, you would like to discuss this matter with me, I will be available any time at your convenience.
8
Thirdly, the 1930s saw the beginning of a significant move from North to South by apparel manufacturers, which was driven by lower wages and financial inducements from town and city governments, who also emphasized the region's antiunion climate (Haberland, 2015). Harwood operated in a precarious and highly competitive industry, as was shown by the fact that it had gone bankrupt in the early 1920s (Kornbluh, 1967; Tyler, 1995). If other companies were gaining a competitive advantage over Harwood by moving, it seems reasonable to assume that Harwood's motivation for moving arose from this rather than a wish to deunionize per se. Having said that, the move does not seem to have been particularly successful in the early years, as the appeal to Lewin for assistance shows (Burnes, 2007). Indeed, despite the move to Marion, Harwood went bankrupt again in 1941. It seems that its fortunes were only saved by the military contracts it was awarded in WWII. 9
Fourthly, after Harwood moved to Marion, it experienced difficulty in training and retaining labor, which seemed to play a key role in its financial problems (Marrow, 1969). However, whilst other companies adopted a Taylorist-style industrial management approach to such difficulties (Tyler, 1995), Harwood embarked upon its famous experiments in participative management (Burnes, 2007). For Marrow, the experiments had two aims: to address Harwood's “practical factory needs” (Marrow, 1969, p. 145); and to develop and demonstrate the effectiveness of Lewin's democratic-participative planned approach to change (French, 1979). Rather than being mere “press agentry” or a means of manipulating workers, it was serious, and for Marrow, a life-long attempt to show that the humanization of work benefitted both employers and employees (Burnes, 2007, 2019; Marrow, 1957). Also, in developing participative management, Marrow worked with Kurt Lewin and other distinguished psychologists, notably Alex Bavalas and John French (French, 1979; Marrow, 1969).
Lastly, it seems highly unlikely that Lewin, given his own political leanings, would have devoted so much time and effort to an initiative that resulted in either the conscious or unconscious manipulation of workers (Perlina, 2015). Indeed, it was Lewin, not Marrow, who devised the experiments (Burnes, 2007). In addition, in parallel with the Harwood experiments, Lewin was developing and using similar techniques to combat racial and religious conflict, which have not drawn such criticisms (Burnes, 2004).
Therefore, in conclusion, what can we say about Harwood's view of trade unions? Prior to its move to Marion, it appears to have had a positive and friendly relationship with the ACWA. In later years, it also seemed to have a positive relationship with the ILGWU and the ACWA (Bowers & Seashore, 1967; Burnes, 2019; Gomberg, 1966a; Kornbluh, 1967). Nevertheless, after the move, there were four attempts to unionize the firm, but it was not until 1946 that the ILGWU's attempt was successful. Is that evidence that Marrow and Harwood were actively antiunion?
Also, we have to recognize that Marrow was based in New York and not Marion. He only visited Marion a few times a year, and on these visits, as one ex-manager noted, “Alfred was a theory man … he was never involved in manufacturing.” 10 Though the Harwood experiments were conducted in his company and with his enthusiastic support, they were devised and directed by Lewin and conducted by a succession of psychologists working for Harwood and based at Marion, chosen by Lewin. Similarly, the day-to-day operation of Harwood was undertaken by local management and not Marrow (Burnes, 2007; Marrow, 1969).
In addition, there does not seem to be any evidence that Harwood engaged in, for the time, typical antiunion rhetoric and behavior at Marion. The prevailing view of American employers was antiunion, which meant not just that they did not want unions in their businesses, but that they did not recognize the right of unions to exist (Harris, 1982). This view grew out of the nineteenth-century era of the “robber barons,” when big business thought it could do what it liked, including getting laws passed that favored them over everyone else in society, particularly their employees (Bridges, 1958; Zinn, 1980). This meant that up to the 1930s, though trade unions were themselves not illegal, many of their activities such as strikes, picketing, and boycotts were illegal under the common law of trade restraint (Hovenkamp, 1987). In America, since the late nineteenth century, private “union busting” organizations, as well as local police and the National Guard, had worked with employers to prevent trade unions from organizing workers, which often involved violent attacks on trade unionists (Smith, 2003; Zinn, 1980). The clothing industry was no exception to this, with employers using “extreme hostility” when faced with attempts to organize their workers (Kornbluh, 1967; Tyler, 1995). Indeed, it was only in 1935, with the passing of the Wagner Act, that trade unions could effectively and legally organize, though this did not stop antiunion violence from some employers (Tyler, 1995; Zinn, 1980).
There is no evidence that Harwood ever used any strong-arm or other tactics to oppose unionization, otherwise, Gomberg would have surely mentioned this instead of commenting on how it was achieved in “record short time.” In any case, such activities would have been against the very principles of democracy that Marrow and Lewin strongly espoused, and which lay at the heart of their approach to participative management (Marrow, 1969). As Jews, they had seen the rise of Nazism, and Lewin had lost his mother and other relatives in the Holocaust. They saw democracy, and the spread of democratic values throughout society, as the central bastion against the authoritarianism and despotism they had lived through (Burnes, 2004, 2007).
Having said that, what was Harwood's attitude to unionization? To understand this, we have to look at three issues:
Marrow was himself a psychologist as well as a manager. Like many psychologists of the time, he probably held the view that much industrial conflict was caused by the failure of management to address workers’ higher-order needs (Desmond & Wilson, 2019; Gomberg, 1957; Marrow, 1957; Zickar, 2004). Marrow might well have viewed unions as an obstacle to addressing workers’ needs because they tended to focus on material rewards—lower-order needs, rather than their higher-order psychological needs. On the other hand, one can also understand why unions might take the opposite view. It also has to be recognized that Marrow, as President of the company, was based at its headquarters in New York and, therefore, was not involved in day-to-day operational decisions and people management. As such, it was not clear the extent to which he was involved in negotiations over union recognition.
How one views Marrow-Harwood's stance on trade unions rather depends on one's own views. However, though the company may have preferred not to have a union, it is not clear that this translated into active opposition, certainly not of the sort of aggressive antiunionism that seems to have been typical in other companies of the day (Smith, 2003; Tyler, 1995). Given this, and given Gomberg's (1966a) view of the speed and ease with which Harwood was unionized, it is difficult to see why Harwood and Marrow should evoke such a strong reaction from Gomberg some 20 years later. In order to explore this further, we will now turn to Gomberg and his role as Director of the Management Engineering Department of the ILGWU.
The ILGWU and Industrial Engineering
In essence, the purpose of the ILGWU's Management Engineering Department was to offer its industrial engineering expertise to companies in the clothing industry where it had members in order to improve their productivity and efficiency (Gomberg, 1947, 1951b; Tyler, 1995). It also used this expertise to assess the fairness of the rates set by a company's own industrial engineers. The ILGWU's form of industrial engineering involved the application to jobs and processes of the time and motion techniques developed by Frederick Taylor and his associates, which are usually referred to as Scientific Management (Barkin, 1950; Nelson, 1995). The aim of Scientific Management is to rationalize and standardize production techniques so as to specify in detail how each worker should perform their job and relate their pay to their individual output, that is, a piecework incentive scheme (Sheldrake, 1996). Therefore, the faster the worker is, the more they earn. After his death, Taylor's work was developed and promoted by the Taylor Society, which merged in 1936 with the Society of Industrial Engineers to form the Society for the Advancement of Management (SAM; Nyland, 1998).
It might be assumed that trade unions would oppose Taylorism and the piecework system rather than seek to implement it on behalf of employers, but this does not seem to have been the case with the ILGWU and some other unions (Barkin, 1950; Nyland et al., 2014; Sheldrake, 1996; Tyler, 1995). However, though other unions employed industrial engineers to check that the times and production methods set by management were fair, only the ILGWU appears to have offered to take over the industrial engineering role of management (Barkin, 1950). Tyler (1995), in his history of the ILGWU, explains the genesis of the Union's Management Engineering Department. 11 The union first embraced Scientific Management in 1916 as part of “the Protocol” with the Dress and Waist Manufacturers Association to police an agreed code of practice between employers and workers. As part of this, they also agreed to promote productivity. As Tyler (1995, p. 137) notes: “Several years of experience under the Protocol had revealed that if shops [i.e., apparel factories] were not run efficiently, neither the employers nor the employees could prosper.”
Therefore, in 1916, a joint union-employers task force was established “to devote itself to ‘intensive work analyses’ that focused on time-and-motion study, fatigue, work flow, and plant layout” (Tyler, 1995, p. 138). Tyler further observes that the rationale underpinning this work was “scientific management.” Though this approach was trialed and applied successfully in a number of enterprises, the protocol as a whole was abandoned by employers who felt that it undermined managerial authority.
Nevertheless, the idea of the union's involvement in industrial engineering was successfully raised again in 1941 by William Gomberg, one of the ILGWU's organizers, who was well-equipped to lead such an initiative as he was awarded an MA in Industrial Engineering in 1941 and would gain his PhD in the same field in 1946 (Kerper, 1985). According to Tyler (1995, p. 139), the Industrial Engineering Department had a double function: First it would introduce a rational—scientific—way of determining piece rates. If an employer and worker price committee could not agree, then let the stopwatch resolve the dispute. Let the anarchy of argument be replaced by the rule of the slide rule. The second function was to advise the employer on how to run [their factory] more efficiently.
Gomberg's (1951a, p. 2) speech stresses that “You cannot separate out our collective bargaining trade activities from our production promotion activities.” By this, he means that the union used a two-pronged approach to negotiating pay. It engaged in collective bargaining to agree a price for each piece/type of work an employee was required to undertake. It also used industrial engineering techniques to determine the best methods and time for doing the work. He gives the example of a company that says it cannot afford to pay its workers more because it is not making enough money. If the ILGWU judges this to be caused by production inefficiencies, then as Gomberg (1951a, p. 3) states, they will say to the company: We will not press you for an increase immediately, but will you let our engineers in … and let us see why at seventeen cents a piece your people are only making ninety cents an hour, while the people down the block are able to make $1.60.
Before moving away from Gomberg's advocacy of industrial engineering, it is worthwhile comparing his views of industrial democracy against those of his own union and of SAM. As stated earlier, in the first of his Trans-Action articles, Gomberg (1966a, p. 32) makes clear that he views democratic-participative management as a “kind of manipulation” of workers by management. Gomberg (1966a, p. 35) also goes on to state that: … it is important to remember that our corporate heads are assigned the task of economic performance, not emotional rehabilitation … [and that] the chief criterion against which they will be judged must remain economic performance.
Also, SAM's view of industrial democracy seems more in line with the ILGWU's than that of Gomberg. SAM, like its predecessor, the Taylor Society, strongly supported the “Mutual-Gains” model of management-worker participation, which in effect meant that when a company increased its profits, a share of it should go to its workers as higher pay (Nyland, 1998). Other unions at the time, not just the ILGWU, also supported the Mutual-Gains model and began to take a more supportive view of Scientific Management (Barkin, 1950). This was a form of industrial democracy in which its leading supporters advocated that management “allow labor to participate as an equal partner in the productive processes” (Nyland, 1998, p. 535).
Another point to note is that Gomberg's three Trans-Action articles appeared in the mid-1960s. This was the last decade of the postwar labor-management consensus in America, which would be swept away in the 1970s by neoliberalism and the pursuit of profit maximization (Mason & Morgan, 2017). In his views on the role of “corporate heads,” Gomberg seems to reject the then prevailing consensus of the role of organizations and the relationship between labor and management. Instead, he seems to align himself with the views of the chief herald of neo-liberalism, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman who in his 1960 book Capitalism and Freedom famously declared: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits” (Friedman, 1970, p. 55).
In looking at Gomberg's (1966a, b, c) three articles in the light of his work with the ILGWU, there appear to be a number of contradictions, which are as follows:
The genesis of the ILGWU's Management Engineering Department, which Gomberg created and was Director of until 1956, lies in the 1916 industrial democracy agreement between employers and the ILGWU (Tyler, 1995). When Gomberg reestablished the industrial engineering element of this in 1941, it seemed to lose nothing of its industrial democracy ethos. In essence, employers who used Gomberg's service were ceding to the union some or all of their control of the production methods that underpinned rate setting. This certainly looks like a form of industrial democracy. However, it should be noted that Gomberg saw industrial engineering as a scientific and, therefore, neutral method for determining the best way to perform a task and the time needed for that task. On the other hand, Gomberg believed that the rate of pay the worker would receive for performing the task should be determined by collective bargaining. As mentioned above, one of his colleagues remarked that “Whatever he believed in, he believed in strongly. He believed in collective bargaining” (Kerper, 1985, p. 16). Collective bargaining is not a form of industrial democracy; nor is it a scientific or neutral or process. Rather it is an exercise in power between unions and management with the outcome, the pay of the worker, determined less by fairness or fact than by which party has the strongest hand (Hayter et al., 2011). On a number of occasions, he goes out of his way to distance his form of industrial engineering from Taylorism (Gomberg, 1951a, 1966a). However, it is not clear how Gomberg's approach to time and motion study differs from Taylor's. In looking at Gomberg's antagonism to the SAM/Taylor Society, it is not clear what his fundamental objections are. His approach to industrial engineering and SAMs seem sufficiently compatible for him to want to join SAM. Similarly, the SAM/Taylor Society's mutual gains approach to industrial democracy seems akin to the joint union–management cooperation promoted by Gomberg.
In the next section, we will compare Gomberg and Marrow's approach to participative management/industrial democracy and improving productivity in order to address these contradictions and seek the root cause of the dispute between the two.
Harwood and the ILGWU: A Case of Role Reversal
In comparing Marrow and Gomberg's approach to democratic-participative management/industrial democracy, three points become clear.
Firstly, the 1950s and 1960s saw the concept of democratic-participative management come to the fore, partly driven by the postwar economic boom and Keynesian economic policies, which led to a better-educated workforce with an expectation that they would be well-rewarded and their views listened to (Bennis, 1966b; Cummings & Worley, 2015). One of its leading academic advocates was Warren Bennis, and one of its main practitioners and publicists was Alfred Marrow. Its core message, as Kirby (2014) notes, was that “organizations require not autocrats at the top, but leaders with more humanistic, democratic styles” (Kirby, 2014). However, the 1960s were also the decade when neoliberalism began to grow in the US, which held to the view espoused by Milton Friedman (1970, p. 55) that “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” This is reflected in Gomberg's (1966a, p. 53) view that “our corporate heads are assigned the task of economic performance, not emotional rehabilitation.”
As can be seen, the differences between Marrow and Gomberg are the role of corporate leaders seems difficult to bridge, given that they are based on different if not incompatible economic and social philosophies.
Secondly, Marrow advocated a form of democracy whereby workers were directly involved in decisions about their own work (Marrow, 1957). Gomberg's view was that workers should (could) only influence decisions about their work indirectly through the work of union officials and collective bargaining. These are not incompatible positions, but, as Volvo found out in the 1960s when it introduced work humanization to the car industry, they are not easily resolved and do require trust and goodwill on all sides (Blackler & Brown, 1978; Pontusson, 1990).
Lastly, we come to the actual managerial practices in Harwood. By the time it was unionized in 1946, Harwood had involved many of the factory's workers and managers in participative management initiatives (Marrow, 1969). These covered topics such as group decision-making, self-management, leadership training, challenging age stereotyping, and overcoming resistance to change. Therefore, by 1946, its workers had experience of being involved in setting their own work methods and pace of work (Burnes, 2007). However, the union's approach was distinctly different. Gomberg and the wider ILGWU's approach to improving their members’ pay and conditions was based on a combination of collective bargaining, to determine the rate for the job, and time and motion studies, to determine the methods and time for the job (Gomberg, 1957; Tyler, 1995). Neither of these directly involved workers. Given Gomberg's involvement in the unionization of Harwood, one can assume that this was the approach taken with the newly unionized company. 13
If that was so, Marrow's reaction to this approach would not have been favorable, to say the least. He might have expected the collective bargaining, but outside involvement in the setting of methods and job times, especially with no direct worker involvement, would have threatened seven years of participative management in the company. It would also, presumably, have come as a shock to the workforce, which might explain Gomberg's (1966a, p. 32) comment about the “aggressive shop steward who damned both the union's officers and the plant management.” Certainly, the shop steward did on occasion complain about the rates set/agreed by the union. 14 He and other workers were excluded from the process and, as the rates had been agreed by the union's own industrial engineers, there was no form of redress should he wish to object.
Tyler (1995, p. 140) observes that the union's industrial engineering approach was a form of “role reversal in the running of factories with the union (the employees) in effect conducting a mobile school to teach their employers how to run the business more intelligently.” However, one might also see Harwood's participative approach, which involved workers setting methods and work rates, as a form of role reversal whereby management ceded some of their power to workers. This then seems to indicate what might be the cause of the clash between Gomberg and Marrow. If Marrow accepted Gomberg's approach to industrial democracy, it would mean rejecting seven years of the Harwood experiments. If Gomberg accepted Marrows’ view of participative management, it would challenge the very basis of his role at the ILGWU and the rationale for the Management Engineering Department that he directed.
Conclusion
In many ways, this paper is a confirmation of the serendipitous nature of research (Nutefall & Ryder, 2010). We have been intrigued for many years by the suggestion that Marrow, whilst being lauded as a pioneer of participative management, could also have been antiunion. Burke knew Marrow and did not think this was the case. Also, though we are familiar with Marrow's writings and have gone through the Marrow Archives at the University of Akron, we have not found any indication that he was antiunion. Nevertheless, as we all know, it is difficult to prove a negative. Though the Gomberg–Bennis–Marrow exchanges in Trans-Action are interesting and entertaining, once again, they did not really take us any further forward in terms of providing evidence one way or another. In retrospect, we now see that, in reading and rereading the exchanges, we missed an important point: nowhere in his three contributions does Gomberg accuse either Marrow or the company of being antiunion per se. Indeed, he finishes the exchanges by stating that they were “not consciously and deliberately manipulative, but just unperceptive” (Gomberg, 1966c, p. 48).
Having come to an apparent dead end with the available Marrow/Harwood material, we began to take an interest in Gomberg. Unfortunately, whether because we were looking in the wrong places or the material was not then on the internet, as with Marrow, we seemed to come to a dead end. However, in 2019, we received a copy of the Gomberg speech from Dr. Carew with an accompanying note that read: I am throwing out files accumulated when writing my Marshall Plan book, and recalling your interest in Bill Gomberg I thought this one just
As indicated above, our conclusions are as follows:
It does not appear that either Marrow or Harwood were actively antiunion. The move to Marion was almost certainly a cost-cutting measure. Like many other companies, it moved South because there was a plentiful supply of labor and wages were lower; if it had not, it would have been at a competitive disadvantage compared to other companies in its industry who had already made the move South. The fact that Virginia was a state that was not heavily unionized may have been a factor, but not the main one. Once established at Marion, for reasons mentioned above, Marrow and Harwood probably preferred not to have the factory unionized, but that was not an unusual view in America or Europe, either then or now. Nevertheless, a preference not to have a union is not the same as being antiunion per se. Certainly, there does not seem to be any evidence that the company tried to prevent its workers from joining a union, which we feel Gomberg would have commented on had it been the case. If Harwood was not actively antiunion, what then was the basis of Gomberg's antagonism to the company and, especially Marrow, some 20 years later? Similarly, why did Marrow feel the need to respond so forcefully and so fully to Gomberg's charges? As Marrow and Gomberg do not seem to have met, then we can probably rule out our personal animosity. Nor can the animosity be explained by the conflict between Harwood and the union. From the ILGWU's perspective, unionization was achieved “in a record short time” (Gomberg, 1966a, p. 32) and, though there was some initial friction between the union and Harwood's then personnel manager, once he left, the union viewed Harwood as “just another company engaged, like everybody else, in day-to-day collective bargaining”
15
(Gomberg, 1966c, p. 48). Therefore, neither the unionization process nor the consequent management–union relations seem to explain the tenor of the 1966 exchanges. Thus the Harwood experience runs completely counter to Gomberg's postulate that “corporate executives are judged by economic performance, not the emotional wellbeing of their employees.” To us the two overlap; many of their components are organically interdependent.
If that is so, where does the explanation lie? As we indicate above, there are two complementary explanations. The first is that Gomberg and Marrow share different world views in terms of employer–worker relations. As Marrow (1966, p. 56) succinctly puts it in his response to Gomberg:
The second explanation for the heated nature of the clash between Gomberg and Marrow can be found in their different approaches to industrial democracy and participative management in practice. For Gomberg, the workers’ interests are best served by union officials acting on their behalf through collective bargaining and the application of industrial engineering techniques to the workers’ jobs in order to improve company profitability. For Marrow, the workers’ best interests are served by involving them directly in making decisions about their work. Once again, it does not matter whether one agrees with these views, the issue is that for Marrow and Gomberg they were irreconcilable. For Gomberg to accept Marrow's views, he would in effect be renouncing the 15 years he put into establishing and directing the ILGWU's Management Engineering Department. For Marrow to accept Gomberg's views, he would be renouncing the decades of work he had put into developing and promoting Lewinian participative management.
In conclusion, we would make three final points. The first concerns the role reversal between the ILGWU and Harwood. Given the nature of the American garment industry in the 1940s (Tyler, 1995), one would have expected to have seen Harwood apply Tayloristic time and motion techniques to overcoming its labor difficulties. One would also have expected to see ILGWU resisting such techniques. Instead, we see the ILGWU seeking to promote and provide such techniques, and Harwood in contrast seeking to include workers in decisions about their own work.
The second point concerns the nature of research. As we noted above, there can be a serendipitous dimension to research—sometimes luck plays a role in discoveries. In our case, we were lucky that Dr. Carew noted the Gomberg speech when he was throwing out old files and remembered that we had been asking about Gomberg. Nevertheless, luck alone does not make good research. As the great golfer Arnold Palmer used to say when people commented that he was a lucky golfer, “The more I practice, the luckier I get.” This can be paraphrased as persistence pays. In our case, this paper has probably been two decades in the making as we have gathered published sources, trawled through archives, and conducted interviews with ex-Harwood workers and their relatives. In an era of “publish or perish” (van Dalen, 2021), the idea of a paper having a gestation period of decades rather than months may seem somewhat impractical, at least in career terms. Nevertheless, in this instance, and we would argue many more, the questions, answers, insights, and the furtherance of knowledge and understanding we achieved were only possible through the slow accumulation of, and reflection on, the evidence we collected. Some might see this as an outmoded approach to research, but for us, it is just good scholarship.
Lastly, and as always, there is the “so what?” question. Why should we be interested in events that took place in the 1940s? The answer, which is obvious, is that not only is democratic-participative management central to OD, but it is also seen as central to the operation of effective and successful organizations, especially in an era where tackling the climate emergency is a prime objective (Battilana et al., 2022; Goleman, 2000; Oreg et al., 2011). The Harwood experiments are viewed as having laid the foundations of OD and participative management, which are based on Kurt Lewin's commitment to the free and democratic involvement of workers in decision-making (Burnes, 2007, 2019; Dent, 2002). Accusations that the motives for the Harwood experiments were based on something else entirely different would have serious implications for how we view OD and participative management today. However, as we have argued, the clash between Gomberg and Marrow is based not on antiunion sentiment by the latter. Instead, the clash represents two differing perspectives on industrial democracy, with Marrow taking what many would consider a more democratic and participatory approach than Gomberg. This is not just comforting to those who support OD and participative management, but crucial to its credibility and standing.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
