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To avoid "creeping recentralization," G.E. now puts more stress on management training than ever before. At G.E.'s three-year-old, $2,000,000 advanced management center on 27 acres at Crotonville, N.Y., doctors in psychology, sociology, even anthropology, teach executives the demands and duties of the management revolution. Says Cordiner: "Today's manager is a man whose task is completely saturated with human relations."
Boulwarism. G.E.'s biggest and most controversial human-relations problem is unions. The company's early labor policies were so liberal (health programs in 1907, pensions in 1912, one of industry's first profit-sharing plans in 1934) that they were considered pink-tinged. But after strike-ridden 1946, G.E. took a hard look at its labor policy and decided to make some changes.
G.E.'s labor policy since then has been termed "Boulwarism," after G.E. Vice President Lemuel R. Boulware—but it could just as well be called "Cordinerism." Cordiner recruited Boulware in 1947 to work out a new labor policy, and has backed him to the hilt. Boulware's new labor line took the salesman's view that the laborer is a customer who has to be sold a product (labor contract)—and that the union is a competitor. He launched a steady barrage of propaganda aimed at winning the worker, used speeches, plant publications, community relations to attack overweening union power, took a tough stand at the negotiating table. Last year Boulware was moved toward retirement into a consultant's post, but, snaps Cordiner, showing a rare flash of anger: "There's been no change in policy."
G.E.'s labor policy has been widely attacked as cynical and paternalistic. It has also been criticized because the company failed to make a distinction between the Communist-dominated United Electrical Workers and the vigilantly anti-Communist International Union of Electrical Workers when the two were battling for the legal right to represent G.E. workers in 1950. But G.E.'s policy has also picked up its admirers as an effective means of meeting union power. G.E. has had far less time lost by strikes than rival Westinghouse, which was tied up for months by a strike in 1956. Appliance Park was called "Cordiner's Folly" by industry leaders, who felt that a strike would tie up all his appliances. That has not happened so far. Last September, when G.E.'s 70,000-member I.U.E. tried to call a strike during contract negotiations, it could not get the necessary two-thirds vote. But I.U.E. Boss Jim Carey has got the union to change the two-thirds provision of its constitution, and the company is bracing for another strike threat in February.