"That co-operation and peace rather than industrial strife and strikes will best promote the prosperity of the employees the company and all of the people and even strengthen the nation"
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A sentence like this is a velvet glove over a steel fist: it wraps a demand for labor discipline in the language of national virtue. Charles E. Wilson, the corporate statesman type, isn’t simply recommending harmony. He’s setting the acceptable boundaries of conflict. “Co-operation and peace” are framed as morally superior, rational, even patriotic; “industrial strife and strikes” become not tactics within a negotiation, but threats to “prosperity” itself.
The intent is managerial persuasion, but the subtext is asymmetry. In practice, “co-operation” usually means workers accepting management’s terms while being told they’re part of a shared project. The phrase “the employees the company and all of the people” performs a rhetorical merger: distinct interests are collapsed into one supposedly unified public good. That move makes dissent look selfish by definition. If everyone’s on the same team, a strike isn’t bargaining; it’s sabotage.
The kicker is “even strengthen the nation.” Wilson recruits nationalism as a backstop for corporate stability, implying that labor unrest is not just a workplace dispute but a civic failing. It’s a familiar mid-century business script, shaped by the postwar fear of disruption, the Cold War suspicion of militancy, and the desire to keep production predictable. The cadence piles up beneficiaries until refusal feels like refusing society itself.
What makes it work is how little it argues and how much it insinuates: prosperity is conditional, peace is the price, and the company gets to define what peace looks like.
The intent is managerial persuasion, but the subtext is asymmetry. In practice, “co-operation” usually means workers accepting management’s terms while being told they’re part of a shared project. The phrase “the employees the company and all of the people” performs a rhetorical merger: distinct interests are collapsed into one supposedly unified public good. That move makes dissent look selfish by definition. If everyone’s on the same team, a strike isn’t bargaining; it’s sabotage.
The kicker is “even strengthen the nation.” Wilson recruits nationalism as a backstop for corporate stability, implying that labor unrest is not just a workplace dispute but a civic failing. It’s a familiar mid-century business script, shaped by the postwar fear of disruption, the Cold War suspicion of militancy, and the desire to keep production predictable. The cadence piles up beneficiaries until refusal feels like refusing society itself.
What makes it work is how little it argues and how much it insinuates: prosperity is conditional, peace is the price, and the company gets to define what peace looks like.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work |
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