The Mill That Asked First

Abstract

Picture a tin-plate mill in Mansfield, Ohio, in the late 1930s. The order book is thin, the equipment is old, and the company is losing money in a decade when losing money usually ended with the gates locked. A union officer who has also worked as a cost accountant goes to the owners with a proposal that is, on its face, strange. He does not ask for higher wages. He asks for permission to put the workers' ideas about cost and waste in front of management, formally, through committees, and for management to listen. The officer was Joseph Scanlon. The company, in the account most later writers repeat, was the Empire Steel and Tin Plate Company. The fullest modern account of his life, Daniel Wren's 2009 biography in the Journal of Management History , was built from archives, unpublished sources and correspondence with Scanlon's daughter and a former colleague, and it describes the plan as his own synthesis of experience: union–management cooperation, employee participation and the sharing of gains from cost savings.