Cyrus S. Ching: pioneer in industrial peacemaking; as a manager, and later as a government executive, Ching pointed the way to a cooperative system of labor relations by showing that differences are much more easily resolved when reason, rather than rancor, prevails

Monthly Labor Review, August, 1989 by A.H. Raskin

The workers' man in management

When the United States entered World War I in 1918, Ching was rejected for military service because no branch of the Armed Forces would take anyone over 6 feet 4 inches. That same year, he quit the Boston El because the declining state of that company's finances had compelled it to petition the Governor and the Massachusetts legislature for takeover by the State. Ching felt he would be happier remaining in private industry and, early in 1919, he went to work for the United States Rubber Company, which had many small plants in New England and other sections of the country. He had no title to start with, but on the basis of his record at the Boston El, he was assigned responsibilities that made him the company's de facto director of industrial relations--a somewhat amorphous assignment because the 40,000 employees working under the U.S. Rubber umbrella were split up among 34 subsidiary companies, most of which had presidents of their own and substantial autonomy in managing their day-to-day affairs.

The first test of how well this bifurcated command structure would operate in the field of labor relations came when workers in the Montreal plant of one affiliate, the Dominion Rubber Company, struck for recognition of a union they were in the process of forming. Ching, with the acquiescence of local management, issued a press statement declaring the company's readiness to meet its employees halfway by setting up grievance machinery, capped by arbitration. That commitment brought Ching a sulphurous rebuke from U.S. Rubber's executive vice president. "Have you gone mad?" Ching's superior bellowed. "We're never going to let outsiders tell our company what to do." Happily for Ching, the president of U.S. Rubber was in the room and promptly overruled his chief aide. "As long as I'm president of this company, we'll never refuse to arbitrate a grievance," he said.

Publication of the Ching statement brought all the strikers back to their jobs in the Canadian unit, and the company established a committee to represent them while arrangements were made for a secret-ballot election on union affiliation. The militantly antimanagement labor movement, the Industrial Workers of the World, had helped initiate the strike, but support for its radical program waned swiftly in the wake of the conciliatory attitude that Ching had persuaded management to adopt. The election resulted in certification of a local chartered directly by the AFL, the first union recognized as a bargaining agent anywhere in the U.S. Rubber corporate structure.

That breakthrough did not unleash a tide of unionization elsewhere in the company, nor did Ching feel it was in the company's best interests to foster such a movement on a broad scale. What deterred him was a recognition that the AFL's commitment to craft delimitation provided poor protection for the welfare of workers in a mass production industry like rubbermaking, which operated along industrial, rather than craft, lines. A preferable alternative, in Ching's estimation, was that each U.S. Rubber plant encourage employees to organize factory councils, which would choose their own officers to meet regularly with management as spokespeople for the work force. It took Ching 4 years to get general acceptance within the company of the factory council idea. That was partly because he had to persuade skeptical plant executives of the scheme's value before he could begin to enlist employee support.