June 12 -The Bosses’ Blueprint for Industrial War

On this day in labor history, the year was 1936.

That was the day Remington Rand president, James Rand boasted of a new scheme.

He called it the Mohawk Valley Formula. 

It served as a blueprint for the future of union busting. 

The National Labor Relations Board called it a battle plan for industrial war. 

Workers at Remington Rand had walked out on strike against the union in late May after enduring a year of anti-union harassment, threatened plant closures and firings of top union leaders. 

The company used a number of dirty tricks during the strike to mislead and demoralize strike forces. 

In his book, The Last Great Strike, Ahmed White describes the purpose and function of the Formula: writing “The scheme figured in the Little Steel Strike, as several authorities would accuse the steel companies of patterning their response to the steel strike after Rand’s formula. It consisted of no fewer than 9 steps, all oriented to employing threatening armed forces, spies and provocateurs, company-sponsored back-to-work movements and staged re-openings to terrorize and demoralize strikers; provoke strikers to violence, and discredit them; then use the specter of violence and pretense of a “state of emergency” to mobilize opposition to the strike on the part of local police and courts; and finally announcing that the strike had been broken and that any remaining resistance was the work of an intractable minority hostile to community values and the “right to work.” 

The central insight behind the formula was that violence could be used, not only to drive workers off picket lines and paralyze them with fear, but also to turn both the law and political sentiments against unionists while justifying the employer’s own conduct and excusing its contempt for labor rights.”