| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 52

Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Nikki Mandel, The Corporation as Family: The Gendering of Corporate Welfare, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press 2002)

THE CORPORATE WELFARE movement that emerged towards the end of the 19th century was awash in familial metaphors. Workers in a wide array of North American corporations were encouraged to think of themselves as members of the corporate family as they availed themselves of a dazzling, if patchy, array of amenities ranging from water fountains and cleaner toilets, to reading rooms and glee clubs, to pensions, paid vacations, and profit sharing. Employers' motives were transparent to both workers at the time and to subsequent historians. As workplaces grew in size and complexity, particularly during the merger movement at the century's end, and as workforces became more diverse and potentially intractable, employers' "search for order" led them to experiment with welfarism.

This was decried by many workers at the time (and, subsequently, by historians) as paternalism. The implication was that welfarism was backward looking, and its critics were always ready to denounce it as "industrial feudalism." Nikki Mandel, however, argues convincingly that "the corporation as family" was not an allusion to a bygone ideal. Rather, the movement faithfully reflected the Victorian values of its sponsors — middle-class men and women. Far from being advocates of a discredited paternalism associated with "indiscriminate charity" and emasculating dependency, they sought to recognize and direct workers' desires for independence and self-respect.

For the Victorian middle-class, the family harboured the solution to social ills. Within the family, boys would learn to channel their natural aggressiveness and girls develop their nurturing characters. The disordered and vice-ridden world of workers and immigrants reflected the failure of the working-class family. Indeed, an emerging breed of sociologists would soon lament the "breakdown of the family." Other social institutions would have to fill the gap, not least of which was the factory itself.

All of this helps explain some of the peculiar features of late 19th-century welfarism. Employers and welfare managers sought to create the proper environment, analogous, in many ways, to their own homes. Reading and smoking rooms were well appointed, lunchrooms provided wholesome meals, restrooms shone as models of privacy and of cleanliness, and gardens bloomed on company grounds. All of this was analogous to the assumed moral effect of middle-class décor on their own class. Women were taught sewing and social skills; men were encouraged to save for their family's future. In short, despite eschewing paternalism, workers were assigned the role of children, requiring the kind of training and direction their own families had failed to provide.

The domestic sphere, of course, was women's and corporate welfarism attracted a considerable cadre of dedicated women. Primarily concerned with employers' motives and workers' responses, Mandel notes that the literature has given short shrift to those who constructed and ran these programs: the welfare managers. They shared much with other Progressive era activists who aimed to extend the values of the home through settlement houses, rational recreation, domestic science, scientific charity organizations, and on and on. Rather than rehashing all of this, Mandel incisively explores the challenges they faced in the corporate world as a means to understanding the dynamics and the trajectory of the movement.

Central to her argument is a recognition that the corporation was not a family, and certainly not the idealized family of the Victorian middle-class. Welfare workers — the putative "mothers" of this fictive family — were outsiders in the business world, both because many (but far from all) were women, and because their agenda differed so markedly from employers. The workplace remained the "foreman's empire," and foremen and line managers resented their authority being challenged, particularly by interlopers who had no business being there in the first place. They had not bought into the "corporation as family" myth, and were hardly likely to, given that they would have no place of authority within it. The employers — the Victorian fathers — were hardly less helpful, since their support of welfare was predicated upon its profitability, and they primarily saw it as a means of controlling their workforce. Indeed, despite the proliferation of welfare schemes, any toehold welfare managers were able to gain within factories was tenuous. This was largely because they took their social housekeeping seriously, often recognizing that the conditions of work, particularly low wages, precluded the stability they sought to provide for working-class families.

Not only was the analogy to the family tenuous in the first place, the gender ideology that provided a space for women here soon shifted. The early 20th-century companionate family ideal undermined notions of motherly duty and promoted more egalitarian gender roles and increased autonomy for family members. Maybe, although it would be difficult to argue that Victorian ideals vanished, particularly within the rarefied culture of corporate America. More convincing is Mandel's argument that the corporation was a poor environment to nurture women's professionalism. Welfare managers were isolated and lacking in autonomy, and were, consequently, unable to build a professional organization that could sustain a professional identity or, in the end, protect their jobs. This, indeed, is a remarkable weakness given the proliferation of women's organizations in every other sphere of activism, and Mandel explains it with considerable skill. As managerial capitalism took firmer root, women welfare workers all but disappeared, replaced by male personnel managers. Here Mandel's focus is weaker, as there is little recognition of the character of the post-World War I labour uprising that gave rise to a flurry of industrial representation plans intended to satisfy workers with an ersatz workplace democracy. This would hardly, though, have weakened Mandel's thesis since they attempted to reflect a citizenship that was deeply gendered.

While Mandel explores the maternal role of welfare managers skillfully, her exploration of the workers' response to all of this is less satisfying. While there are accounts of workers shunning the role of corporate child, preferring to maintain their independence and dignity, the evidence here is considerably spottier. The problem is the wide diversity of welfare schemes. Although Mandel cites impressive statistics as to their breadth, welfare plans were often very rudimentary. Even among workplaces with substantial plans, workers might face diverse scenarios often, as Mandel notes, finely attuned to workers' gender (and also to their ethnicity, age, organizing capabilities, history, and so on). In order to tell these stories, a very different focus would be necessary. An interesting counterexample is Joan Sangster's careful analysis of women's work culture and welfare capitalism at Westclox in Peterborough. Here many variables are brought into play to explain the process of accommodation. Although the timeframe is later and more sources are available, it is important to take note of gendered cultures, local traditions, and limited options, that confronted specific groups of workers.

Welfare capitalism certainly represented a coherent movement within North American business. But at the same time, it is a catch-all of diverse and often contradictory actions. As Nikki Mandel quite rightly argues, corporate behaviour was informed by Victorian family ideology. Nevertheless, anyone who has studied corporate welfarism will recognize how variable its programs, and consequences, were. Her recognition of the centrality of gender ideology to the entire enterprise will prove invaluable for those studying workers' lives under corporate welfare regimes. There is still much to learn about how corporate welfarism shaped class and gender relations in the workplace. Local studies are a staple of labour history and this national survey — as strong as it is — reminds us that class and gender are shaped in concrete relations on the shop floor, in homes, and in neighourhoods. This book should help reinvigorate such research.


James Naylor Brandon University

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