Mohawk Valley formula

The Mohawk Valley formula is a plan for strikebreaking purportedly written by the president of the Remington Rand company James Rand, Jr. around the time of the Remington Rand strike at Ilion, New York in 1936/37.

The plan includes discrediting union leaders, frightening the public with the threat of violence, using local police and vigilantes to intimidate strikers, forming associations of "loyal employees" to influence public debate, fortifying workplaces, employing large numbers of replacement workers, and threatening to close the plant if work is not resumed.

The authenticity of the written plan has never been clearly established. Although it was allegedly published in the National Association of Manufacturers Labor Relations Bulletin, no original copy has been found, nor does NAM list it among its pamphlets from that era. Parts of the plan use language sympathetic to the views of labor organizers. The Remington Rand company did indeed ruthlessly suppress the strikes, as documented in a ruling by the National Labor Relations Board, and the plan has been accepted as a guide to the methods that were used. At least one source names the strikebreaker Pearl Bergoff and his so-called "Bergoff Technique" as the origin of the formula. Rand and Bergoff were both indicted by the same federal grand jury for their roles in the Remington Rand strike.

Noam Chomsky has described the formula as the result of business owners' trend away from violent strikebreaking to a "scientific" approach based on propaganda. An essential feature of this approach is the identification of the management's interests with "Americanism," while labor activism is portrayed as the work of un-American outsiders. Workers are thus persuaded to turn against the activists and toward management to demonstrate their patriotism.

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