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Recent years have seen an upsurge in union activity. At Amazon warehouses, Starbucks coffee shops, and auto manufacturing plants in the South, workers have asserted their collective interests and, in many cases, won union recognition and significant concessions. Yet unionization efforts have had to contend with one of management’s most powerful weapons—propaganda. Whether by inundating workers with anti-union messaging (as Amazon and other clients of the union-busting industry have done) or calling for teamwork and cooperation, propaganda has long been a powerful communications tool among those determined to undermine workers’ collective interests. For over a century, managers and specialists aligned with them have dedicated energy and resources to weakening unions. Although many workers are familiar with management propaganda, its roots, development, and relationships to broader historical forces are understood less well.
Source: University of Massachusetts Press
I explore this history in my book, Work Better Live Better: Motivation, Labor, and Management Ideology. While labor historians usually examine the lives and activities of workers, I wanted to explore how managers have used propaganda to advance their interests and marginalize unions. The anti-union propaganda campaigns led by business and management during World Wars I and II loom large in this story. In each case, managers and their allies used propaganda extensively, tapping techniques developed by advertising specialists to tie workers’ interests to those of the nation while subtly challenging unions. After World War II, these efforts went into overdrive. Specialists developed sophisticated propaganda systems steeped in visually stimulating tributes to the economic gains provided to workers by business and management (even as, in reality, those gains resulted largely from wage increases hard-won by unions). While propaganda became a powerful weapon in management’s arsenal, its assertions and strategy did not emerge in a vacuum. As I trace throughout the book, they were rooted in a concept that lies at propaganda’s core—motivation.
Bosses have always used motivational techniques to influence workers’ behavior. In the early twentieth century, managers used scientific management, or Taylorism, to incentivize workers by tying their earnings to their individual productivity. During World War I, however, managers’ approach to motivation began to take on another dimension in the wake of arguments by industrial psychologists and other specialists that workers were motivated not by monetary rewards but by human and emotional needs. Among the advocates of this view was the advertising theorist, Walter Dill Scott. Scott asserted that managers could increase workers’ productivity via applied psychology. In particular, he encouraged them to use the power of “suggestion”—a tactic deployed successfully in advertising—to enhance mood and encourage workers’ feelings of belonging and identification with their employer. Despite encouraging managers to address the “human factor” in industrial work, such rhetoric was anchored in specialists’ belief that labor unions were irrational and prone to dangerous impulses. Reflecting this view, the organizational theorist Ordway Tead described unions as “more intense, fickle, and primitive than are their constituent members as individuals.” Managers, he argued, thus needed to channel workers’ instincts and behaviors in “productive” directions and secure their “acquiescent submissiveness.” The idea that managers could modify workers’ emotions and conduct as claimed by specialists like Scott and Tead helped pave the way for a major development in managerial quests to weaken unions—the advent of new motivational communication techniques in the workplace.
Poster created by Mather & Company, 1929 / Source: Library of Congress
As the propaganda campaigns of World War I underscored, the motivational communications forms familiar to the workplace from this point forward were decidedly visual, a strategy that took its cues from the fields of advertising and public relations. Poster campaigns formed a central pillar of management’s communications apparatus. The federal government’s propaganda poster campaigns of World War I and World War II are familiar to many today. It was hardly alone in disseminating posters, however. During the 1920s, a private motivational industry emerged led by the Chicago-based firm, Mather & Co., which sent scores of salesmen out across the country selling posters and other communication materials to employers. Mather’s posters espoused the virtues of employee discipline and other “positive” behaviors (while discouraging “negative” kinds) and asserted that workers would be well rewarded for company-mindedness. The elite-minded ideals promoted in Mather’s poster campaigns reflected the values of the businessmen who produced them and spoke little to the lives of industrial workers. As out of step as its campaigns were with the aspirations of most workers, however, it established a nationwide business in motivational propaganda promoting managerial values and made huge sales in the process ($12 million in 1928 alone).
Mather’s elite-minded visions of motivation ceased selling as mass unemployment set in during the Great Depression. However, another Chicago firm, the Sheldon-Claire Company, revived the poster business during World War II. Hired by the US government, it supplied employers with streamlined campaigns that combined images of heroic-looking workers and attention-grabbing captions urging workers to support national war aims. Some of its posters included modified photographs produced by the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration Photo Unit during the 1930s. The black-and-white photographs were colorized, cropped, and recaptioned. Repurposed and integrated into the campaign’s assertions of the freedoms enjoyed by American workers, the images were transformed into visual tributes to the righteousness of American capitalism. During the late 1940s, Sheldon-Claire expanded the features of its campaigns to include home mailings (that explained the themes and implications of each weekly poster) and supporting literature that advised supervisors on how to promote the posters’ ideas to rank-and-file workers. Throughout the 1950s, the firm continued to supply employers with campaigns that espoused the virtues of the “American Way of Life” and encouraged workers to embrace labor-management cooperation—an indirect caution against union agitation. The firm’s salesmen also gave talks to supervisors and union representatives in factories to aid the smooth integration of the campaigns and elicit support for them. As with much of the motivational propaganda distributed in the industrial workplace, posters circuited by the federal government and private organizations alike used images of white male workers to symbolize the motivated worker. Thus, motivational propaganda perpetuated assumptions, invoked in images of work since the nineteenth century, that white men were the self-evident embodiments of motivated labor, a history I trace in the book.
Cover of My job contest by Chester E. Evans and La Verne N. Laseau / Source: Internet Archive
During the postwar era, large industrial corporations used motivational propaganda in highly strategic ways to advance their crusade against the New Deal and labor unions. This was true at General Motors and General Electric, each of which I explore. GM used numerous propaganda techniques to promote management’s values, including employee contests, “educational” booklets, and suggestion plan schemes. Through the firm’s Information Rack System, GM’s communications experts endeavored to spread “mental and spiritual nourishment” to employees. The booklets’ content ranged from anticommunist and antisocialist screeds to tributes to business leadership and “free enterprise” (thinly veiled condemnations of unions and the New Deal). Between 1948 and 1952, GM distributed 47 million copies of its booklets to workers.
GE’s chief employee relations specialist, Lemuel Boulware crafted a distinct form of motivational messaging. Guided by his antipathy toward unions, and in the wake of the United Electrical Workers’ victory over the company during a 1946 strike, Boulware’s Employee Relations department developed an aggressive strategy for defeating the International Union of Electrical Workers. It included the dissemination of an avalanche of publicity touting employees’ economic gains relative to those at other firms (even as the company undermined those gains by shifting operations to the non-unionized South throughout the postwar years). The visual culture of Boulwarism stripped away the complexity of economic issues and presented them as simple dichotomies and choices for workers. This tactic was typified in a 1948 cartoon in the firm’s magazine, the Commentator. Depicting workers as members of a baseball team next to a looming, stubborn-looking giant labelled “Inflation,” the cartoon’s caption asked, “Are we better off . . . grumbling and griping about everything—sort of wearing blinders because we don’t want to see any of the good things about our job and the company we work for . . . or teaming up?” Boulware’s communications apparatus, along with his refusal to negotiate with the union after the company’s initial offer, played a central role in GE’s victory during a 1960 strike by the IUE. His aggressive attempts to neutralize unions, along with his anti-New Deal beliefs also later informed the policies and anti-union tactics of one of his leading admirers—Ronald Reagan.
One might think that managers and their allies would have been anxious to learn how workers responded to the motivational propaganda disseminated in the American workplace throughout the twentieth century. As it turns out, however, those who designed and used propaganda made only limited efforts to identify workers’ reactions to it. The reasons lie largely in the fact that motivational communications were influenced heavily by the fields of industrial psychology and advertising. Specialists in both fields were more concerned with the subtle influence of emotions and habits than convincing workers of specific arguments or achieving changes in behavior that would later be measured. With more pressing priorities to deal with, managers rarely felt compelled to devote time or resources to ascertaining workers’ responses to posters, films, booklets, and other materials. Like the specialists whose ideas informed motivational propaganda, they assumed that maintaining a carefully designed motivational communications system was a self-evidently useful idea.
Page 21 of "My Job and Why I Like It" published by General Motors Company, 1948 / Source: Internet Archive
Communications specialists sometimes surveyed workers’ responses to propaganda but usually in order to gather material that could be deployed (in highly selective ways) to confirm the validity of the messages and promote employee goodwill toward the company. A study by GM’s personnel relations specialists into entries during a 1948 contest inviting workers to write letters discussing “My Job and Why I Like It” is a case in point. Echoing the manipulative tactics used in the contest itself (which, as UAW president Walter Reuther noted, amounted to a “one-sided opinion poll”), the book’s authors used the letters to confirm the contest’s premise that workers held the firm in high regard and that concerns about monotony on the production line were overblown. As Reuther predicted, GM recycled passages from the winning letters in its employee publications and PR campaigns well into the 1950s. With similar goals in mind, Mather and Sheldon-Claire also solicited responses to their campaign materials, though only from supervisors and managers, not rank-and-file workers. Both firms used snippets of these responses in their marketing publicity to attest to the effectiveness of their campaigns. Unsurprisingly, negative responses were not used, though some survive in the companies’ archived papers.
Although it may be tempting to assume that workers rejected the messaging they encountered, the reality is likely more layered. Certainly, instances of worker resistance to propaganda occurred, including at GM where, in response to the “My Job and Why I Like It” contest, members of one Flint local published mock letters that scorned the firm’s history of union-busting tactics. On the other hand, however, managers and their allies have, with some exceptions, generally believed that controlling the rhetoric about work that circulates in the workplace is useful in its own right. From their perspective, the value of motivational propaganda was its ability to distil ideas in emotionally stimulating and innocuous-seeming messages however consciously or unconsciously workers encountered them.
Source: Pixabay
The motivational messaging deployed by management today blends the ideology that informed its twentieth-century predecessors with new concepts and new technology. Present-day employers seek to influence workers’ emotions and behavior through worker wellness initiatives, the use of devices to track and monitor workers, and gamification (the application of game elements to increase employee engagement). These tools emphasize the “rewards” of teamwork and company-mindedness while obscuring management’s true goals—higher productivity, workers’ identification with management ideas, and the marginalization of unions. The power of motivational ideology is based largely on the fact that it is interwoven with familiar ideals about American individualism. The “inspirational” messages seen in workplaces since the 1990s defining work as a route to personal success and fulfillment, along with the more recent inducements to “Do What You Love” may, to many, appear innocuous. But whether circulated by management in the workplace or by business organizations elsewhere, motivation isn’t innocuous at all. As was the case when it was conceived in the early twentieth century, its purpose today is to advance management’s goals at the expense of workers’ collective interests.
The history of motivational propaganda offers an important window into managers’ long-term efforts to define work’s meaning and rewards and undermine unions. Recognizing the ideologies at the core of motivation is crucial considering that managers continue to espouse the rewards of motivated work even as workers’ economic rewards continue their post-1970 decline. Fueled by Reagan-era pro-business policies and assaults on unions, as well as the decline of secure jobs amidst the growth of the gig economy, wages and economic security are increasingly precarious. Given that organizations continue to deploy propaganda, albeit usually in more subtle forms than in the past, understanding the history of motivational ideology, including the beliefs, strategy, and design principles that have informed it over time is vital for workers and their allies.
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