National Association Of Manufacturers Research Articles

The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism

The Industrialists: How the National Association of Manufacturers Shaped American Capitalism

Brief of Amicus Curiae Professor Sean J. Griffith in Support of Intervenor, National Association of Manufacturers, in National Center for Public Policy Research v SEC, No. 23-60230 (Fifth Cir., Oct. 5, 2023)

Brief of Amicus Curiae Professor Sean J. Griffith in Support of Intervenor, National Association of Manufacturers, in National Center for Public Policy Research v SEC, No. 23-60230 (Fifth Cir., Oct. 5, 2023)

Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States

Murder in the Garment District: The Grip of Organized Crime and the Decline of Labor in the United States

Who Tells Your Story: Contested History at the NAM

From 1948 to 1960, an executive secretary at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) attempted to persuade NAM leaders to commission an “objective” history of the organization. The project never came to fruition, but the story reveals a fundamental split within the NAM between its professional staff and its conservative leadership over the organization’s mission. It thus offers a unique perspective on the NAM not as a powerful lobby, but as a contested workplace with its own fraught dynamics, which, in turn, reveals a more progressive image of the 1950s-era NAM than historians have typically recognized.

Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care SystemRemaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care SystemRemaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement by Chad Pearson

Reviewed by: Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement by Chad Pearson Dennis P. Halpin Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement. By Chad Pearson. American Business, Politics, and Society. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. viii, 303. $55.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4776-3. Chad Pearson's Reform or Repression: Organizing America's Anti-Union Movement makes significant contributions to the history of labor, management, and capitalism while provoking important questions about Progressive-era reform. Pearson analyzes employer associations and the "open-shop [End Page 716] movement"—which sought to prevent employee engagement with labor unions—between 1890 and 1917 (p. 3). Pearson organizes his work spatially by looking at the national development of the open-shop idea before delving into four case studies in Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Worcester, Massachusetts; and the South. Using newspapers accounts, trade journals, magazines, and speeches, he unearths a complicated, nuanced history of the anti-union movement that, as the title suggests, blurred the line between reform and repression. Pearson contributes much to our understanding of employer motivations in the turbulent years between 1890 and 1917. Historians have largely written about this period from the perspective of workers who organized, struck, and rioted in their quest for recognition, workplace protections, and higher wages. When this scholarship has considered employers, it has been as one-dimensional reactionaries. Yet as Pearson demonstrates, employers' motivations were complex. Employers' vision of the open shop aligned with their view that unions were lawless, anti-individualistic, inefficient, and un-American. Employers believed that the open shop rewarded hardworking, skilled, and determined individuals. Employers did not see a conflict between their own collective action when they formed organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Citizens' Industrial Association of America and their ongoing denunciation of unions as "labor trusts" (p. 2). By placing employers at the center of his analysis, Pearson draws our attention to the people who "wielded a tremendous amount of authority over the lives of millions of people"(p. 2). One of the more surprising elements of Pearson's study is that a diverse array of people joined employers in supporting and promoting the open shop. Pearson populates his book with a number of these figures, from the better-known Theodore Roosevelt, Ray Stannard Baker, Louis D. Brandeis, and Booker T. Washington to the relatively obscure open-shop evangelist Ernest F. Du Brul and journalist George Creel. As this list illustrates, the open-shop movement appealed across political ideologies and cut across racial, religious, and geographic lines as well. The widespread support for the open shop demonstrates the effectiveness with which employers delivered their message. This support also helps explain how these ideas continue to influence how many perceive labor unions, collective action, and management to this day. Given Pearson's regional approach, it is surprising that he did not include a case study of a western location. In many ways, the West looms large in Pearson's examination. Some of the open-shop movement's most prominent advocates hailed from places like Kansas City, Missouri; Omaha, Nebraska; and Helena, Montana. The region also seems rife for exploration, as it was the setting for some of the most spectacular outbreaks of labor-management conflict during this period. As it stands, Pearson's study rarely crosses the Mississippi River, especially in his later chapters. That minor criticism does not detract from what is an important book that challenges readers to grapple with a dark undercurrent running through the Progressive reform agenda. Pearson maintains, "Open-shop campaigners repeatedly proclaimed a desire to protect, rather than punish, ordinary people"(p. 217). In this sense, their movement fits comfortably with our understanding [End Page 717] of Progressive reform. As Pearson points out, however, the open-shop movement served the interests of the rich at the expense of the poor and the working class. Ultimately, open-shop reform efforts helped sustain "an economic system designed to protect the most privileged classes of Americans at the expense of those who had demanded a more democratic say over their lives"(p. 20). Dennis P. Halpin Virginia Tech Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Compelled Commercial Speech

This paper is the text of the fourth annual C. Edwin Baker Lecture for Liberty, Equality, and Democracy at the West Virginia University College of Law, which will be delivered in November and subsequently published in the West Virginia Law Review. The article explores the burgeoning doctrine of “compelled commercial speech,” with special emphasis on recent decisions of the United States Court of Appeals for District of Columbia Circuit, including American Meat Institute (“AMI”) v. Department of Agriculture, an en banc decision upholding the mandated labeling of meat products; National Association of Manufacturers (“NAM”) v. SEC, which struck down features of SEC mandated reports about the origins of conflict minerals; and R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. v. FDA, which invalidated FDA mandated graphic cigarette warnings. Commercial speech doctrine was established in order to protect what Central Hudson called the “informational function” of commercial communications. The object of the doctrine was explicitly to protect the capacity of an audience to receive information rather than to safeguard the autonomy of a commercial speaker. The informational function implies a constitutional asymmetry between restrictions on commercial speech and compelled disclosures of commercial speech. The former impair the distribution of information; the latter enhance it. The tendency of many judges to adjudicate compelled commercial speech cases in light of decisions like West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, which defend the autonomy of speakers within public discourse, is deeply misplaced. The article defends the proposition that First Amendment jurisprudence is plural, not unitary. The Court embraced the plurality of First Amendment jurisprudence in Zauderer v. Office of Disciplinary Counsel, which holds that factual commercial speech can be compelled if it is “reasonably related” to an appropriate government purpose. First Amendment rights of commercial speakers in such circumstances are deemed to be “minimal.” The article discusses the relationship between the Zauderer test for compelled commercial speech and the Central Hudson test for restrictions on commercial speech, which is the object of much unfocused discussion in AMI. Compelled commercial speech, like government speech, is an effort to affect the content of public opinion. Both compelled commercial speech and government speech raise questions about how a democratic government may constitutionally influence the shape of a public opinion to which it is in theory responsive. The article seeks to explain certain doctrinal restrictions on compelled commercial speech in light of constitutional concerns that arise when government seeks to affect the content of public opinion. It offers an analysis of why government efforts to inform public opinion through the required disclosure of facts is constitutionally distinct from government efforts to shape public opinion through the required disclosure of opinions. The article explores how compelled disclosures of opinion may constitutionally be distinguished from compelled disclosures of fact, a distinction that lies at the heart of decisions like NAM and R.J. Reynolds. The article also discusses the kinds of state interests that may justify compelled commercial speech, which is the subject of great dispute in AMI.

Conflict over Conflict Minerals: U.S. Policy Fails First Amendment Test

In an effort to stem the resources available to armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the U.S. government passed a law requiring issuers to file reports with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission discussing whether materials used in their products include "conflict minerals"-materials that are sourced from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and neighboring countries. The National Association of Manufacturers challenged the law on several grounds and was partially successful. The appeals court reviewing the challenges determined that a portion of the law violated the First Amendment by requiring issuers to state whether their products were "free" of conflict minerals. This paper describes the law and the court challenges, including the current status of appeals. The paper also describes the recent filings that were required to be made under the law and practice tips for issuers to comply with the law.

The National Association of Manufacturers' Community Relations Short Film Your Town: Parable, Propaganda, and Big Individualism

In the aftermath of the Great Depression, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) faced growing antibusiness sentiment. In 1940, as part of a widespread propaganda campaign to assuage public concerns about industry and rehabilitate big business's reputation, NAM created and distributed the community relations short film, Your Town. The movie, pursuing an integration propaganda strategy, appealed to Americans' individualistic values by portraying industry as a beneficent fellow traveler who was a big individual—a heroic, larger-than-life figure who could make the land profitable and guard the citizenry against evil, antibusiness influences. Applying Vogler's (1997) synthesis of Campbell's (1949) heroic narrative form, this article shows that NAM's portrayal of industry as a hero has continued to resonate with strains of contemporary American thought that (a) sees business as the foundation for societal progress and stability and (b) conceptualizes the corporate entity as a person. Finally, this study finds that, although the language of corporate personhood has been implied in organizational community relations rhetoric for at least six decades, more recent events reveal a public that is more circumspect about the beneficence of the corporate persona.

Manufacturing Hiring Trends: Employers Seeking More Diverse Skills

According to the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), 32% of American manufactures reported that even during the height of the recession, they had unfilled job openings. The reason cited for this phenomenon was that American manufacturers were unable to find workers with the skills they required. The inability to close the gap between the managerial skills American manufacturers want and the skills available in the workforce continues to hinder the hiring process. In an effort to understand the disconnect, this study was conducted among manufacturers with facilities located in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan areas to determine the skills most sought after by manufacturers as they attempt to hire recent college graduates. The results revealed a shift away from the traditional skill focus of engineering curriculums toward a more rounded skill set - one relying heavily on a host of people skills and a sophisticated understanding of the cross functional relationships that exist between traditional disciplines. The study also revealed that manufactures are placing an increased emphasis on outside certifications as a way to reduce expensive in-house training costs. Finally, employers are looking to institutions of higher learning as leaders in their effort to provide the skills graduates need to succeed in manufacturing.

Employer Organizations’ Influence on the Progressive-Era Press

One of the major issues of public debate in the early twentieth century was “the labor question:” what rights did workers versus employers have and what forms of production and ownership were fair? This article examines the attempts of organized employers to shape this debate by influencing press coverage in the early twentieth century. It focuses on the two main business organizations of the period, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Civic Federation. They ostensibly advocated different approaches to industrial relations, but this study argues their public disagreements ultimately had the effect of constricting the boundaries of discussion about labor in not only small newspapers but even the sophisticated press—respected daily newspapers and prominent magazines.

A VIEW THAT'S FIT TO PRINT

This study examines the appearance of National Association of Manufacturers' (NAM) propaganda, from 1937 to 1939, in articles within The New York Times. NAM's ability to place such rhetoric in The New York Times reveals both the presence of integration propaganda and the beginning of a press acclimation to propaganda as news. This examination reveals a crystallizing of professional journalism's reliance on authoritative, yet propagandistic sources, a dynamic that persists to this day.

Racial integration in corporate America, 1940-1990

Introduction Part I. Color-Blind Groundwork, 1940-61: 1. The African American struggle for jobs 2. Fair employment is good business 3. Racial liberalism and the mid-twentieth century executive 4. Human relations in management 5. Human relations at International Harvester and Pitney-Bowes Part II. Color-Conscious Ascendancy, 1961-1990: 6. How compliance became voluntarism 7. The National Association of Manufacturers helps out 8. Changing hiring criteria 9. The Du Pont company's affirmative action efforts Epilogue: from affirmative action to diversity.

LINKING ENERGY TO CLIMATE-CHANGE POLICY

AS CONGRESS PREPARES to take up its first major global warming bill, chemical manufacturers and other fossil-fuel-dependent businesses are warning lawmakers that energy costs will skyrocket if mandatory limits are placed on greenhouse gas emissions. “We are trying to educate people about the link between natural gas and climate change,” says Thomas J. Gibson, senior vice president of advocacy for the American Chemistry Council (ACC), the industry’s chief lobbying organization. “What Congress keeps missing is that we need more natural gas, not less.” Despite the politics of an election year, Gibson and other trade association officials aren’t ruling out congressional action this year on global warming and a host of other key issues, including energy, security, taxes, and transportation. Major business organizations, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers, remain adamantly opposed to so-called cap-and-trade proposals to cut emissions linked to climate change, main...

“Things Are Different Down Here”: The 1955 Perfect Circle Strike, Conservative Civic Identity, and the Roots of the New Right in the 1950s Industrial Heartland

AbstractThe article examines the history of the violent 1955 Perfect Circle strike to join the growing body of labor history scholarship that rejects the existence of a postwar “labor-management accord.” Contrary to previous depictions of a postwar “class peace,” the small-town industrial Midwest stood as a key battleground between unionized workers and competitive-sector employers such as the Indiana-based Perfect Circle Corporation, a small, family-owned manufacturer, a model welfare capitalist firm, and one of the nation's leading automotive parts producers. Driven by their desire to hold down labor costs and their own antistatist ideology, Perfect Circle's owners had opposed the New Deal and, by the late 1930s, had shed their previous provincialism to join the national political coalition of business conservatives in the National Association of Manufacturers to secure the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947. During the Cold War era, even while they were extending their political reach and expanding their operations overseas, Perfect Circle's owners sought to forge labor-management unity by promoting a quaint vision of “heartland consensus,” a conservative civic identity that management was convinced would render unions unnecessary. As with many business conservatives, Perfect Circle owners tried to rid their plants of unions by tapping into an interlocking network of well-financed right-wing policy groups to mount an extensive employee educational program and public relations campaign in defense of “free enterprise.” Despite Perfect Circle's vigorous efforts to undercut unionization, by 1953 the majority of workers at all four of its east-central Indiana plants voted to affiliate with the United Auto Workers (UAW). Conflict between labor and management culminated in the violent 1955 strike, in which Perfect Circle handed the UAW a decisive defeat while enjoying widespread support from the regional and national press. The strike became a conservativecause célèbreduring the 1957 national “right-to-work” campaign and a centerpiece of the Senate's 1958 McClellan “Labor Rackets” hearings, which launched Barry Goldwater's bid for the 1964 presidency. The article concludes that Perfect Circle and many other employers not only continued to contest unions in the 1950s but also played a neglected but important role in the formation of the New Right.

Sectional Parties, Divided Business

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) led the corporate attack on labor organization and government regulation in the early twentieth century. Yet NAM's deep distrust of coordination, in fact, developed years into its organizational life: at its inception, NAM organizers sought mechanisms to coordinate economic and political business activity, and held policy positions that resembled those favored by contemporaneous European manufacturers. Thus, the organization's dramatic shift in policy preferences almost a decade later was something of a sea change: suddenly NAM became committed to laissez-faire liberalism—the antithesis of coordination—and became best-known for its commitment to fighting organized labor.

LABOR HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

LABOR HISTORY SYMPOSIUM

Redefining What High School Students Learn

PERHAPS a flat world makes it easier for lemmings to run faster. And maybe that's why our policy makers and assorted politicians seem to be following an agenda for K-12 education that could lead us all off the cliff. For once, the major issue is not just the No Child Left Behind Act's imposition of a business model of accountability on the nation's public schools. The new worry is the business community's sudden alarm about a dearth of math and science talent to fuel our competitiveness. So the President wants to pitch career and technical education (yet again) in favor of programs to stimulate math and science instruction, the governors are insisting that high school reforms focus on math and science, and almost every public official now speaks of a gloomy future if we don't swell enrollments in engineering and the sciences. For example, up to the very end of the most recent report on the gap in the manufacturing industry, released in 2005 by the National Association of Manufacturers, the shortage of math and science expertise seems to dominate the industry's concerns. Manufacturers across all sections of the country report shortages of technical and engineering employees. Yet one-third also face shortages of unskilled production employees. And then comes this revealing statement, literally on the last page of the report: To better understand which skill deficiencies among current employees significantly contribute to negative business performance, the most frequently cited concern is inadequate basic employability skills, including attendance, timeliness, and work ethic. This finding poses an interesting challenge to the public education system, the report notes. It certainly does. And it calls into question the pell-mell rush to embrace so-called rigor in the high school curriculum, which many students regard as irrelevant to them. It makes one wonder about the human costs of the high-stakes testing that consumes the life of schools at the expense of other values. And it challenges policies that push students of school prematurely--before they have had a chance to develop the skills that will serve them well in the workplace. The current campaign for high academic standards is becoming an either/or choice for students--a sort of take algebra II or get out kind of dilemma. Students do need to have basic competencies they can build on later in life, and every student should be challenged to reach his or her fullest potential. Without any doubt, poor and minority children need to have a fair shot at the advanced courses that lead to math- and science-based professions. In fact, if we don't make that happen, our pool of researchers and engineers will truly shrink to dangerous levels because one-third of the school population will soon be either low-income or minority or both. (Incidentally, white, higher-income high school students in this country compete well on international tests in math. Our poor children, however, do worse than poor children in other countries.) Judging by the increasing dropout rates and widespread lack of student engagement in learning, it seems that too many young people are turned off by the punitive methods being used to make them better students. Some of the blame must be laid at the door of educators who have lost their sense of purpose. At a time when young people crave mentoring by adults and want some clarity about values in their lives, schools give them drill-and-kill education. Even advanced students are feeling cheated as they waste time underlining phrases instead of studying rich literature in order to prepare for state tests that mean little to their future. …

Commentary: A National Association of Manufacturers Perspective on Manufactures Liberalization

A commentary on Alan V. Deardorff and Robert M. Stern, University of Michigan, "Issues of Manufactures Liberalization and Administered Protection." Christopher Wenk is Director of International Trade Policy at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), which is the U.S. largest industry trade association, representing small and large manufacturers in every industrial sector and in all 50 states. Wenk advocates on behalf of the NAM's members on international trade issues with the Administration and U.S. Congress and works with NAM policy organizations to formulate positions on trade issues and manages industry group coalitions on behalf of the NAM, including the WTO Action Group and the Zero Tariff Coalition. Before joining the NAM, Wenk spent more than five years working on Capitol Hill with the House Small Business Committee, Congressman Steve Chabot (R-OH) and Congressman Dave Camp (R-MI), a member of the House Ways and Means Trade Subcommittee.

The National Association of Manufacturers and the Militarization of American Conservatism

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) played an important role in the emerging conservative movement in the United States, both before and after World War II, but its contribution to the increasing militarism of that movement has received little scrutiny. Between 1958 and 1975, a combination of organizational changes peculiar to NAM and political pressures from both the right and the left led NAM to adopt and maintain a militaristic posture. In the late 1950s, a decline in the organization's membership resulted in a take over by larger corporations, which purged the board of its ultraconservative leadership. The reorganized board established a National Defense Committee (NDC) in order to promote defense industry membership and, by 1962, had selected a new permanent president, Werner Gullander. Under Gullander, the NDC moved NAM in the direction of support for defense expansion during the early 1960s.