TWO ATTACKS AND A WARNING

Teams equipped with plays had been at work in most of the advanced industrial countries as well as in many developing countries. They had used much the same methods as in the Ruhr and the British coalfields. In Britain this work had spread to many situations in the docks, the motor industry and elsewhere. For example, at Mackinac in 1951, Buchman had been presented with a model of a tractor, symbolising the end of a personality clash in the Ford Motor Company's Dagenham plant between a shop steward convenor responsible for 16,000 men and the superintendent of the assembly building. The results were reflected in productivity and pay charts. The superintendent, H. W. Whatham, speaking with the convenor, Arthur Morrell, at his side, said, 'Production efficiency has reached 100.4 per cent, the highest it has ever been since the war. Not a single grievance has left the assembly line unsolved since we started on moral re-armament. We have cut out overtime in the export shipping department and the men are receiving pay increases.'8 Buchman always chaffed Whatham on his figures. 'My standard is 100 per cent,' he would say. 'How do you get 100.4 per cent?'*

(* Buchman refused to quote this figure in his next broadcast, contenting himself with the previous month's figure of 99.43 per cent, which was already better than anything since the war.)

A more far-reaching development had taken place in the French textile industry through the initiative of Maurice Mercier, Secretary-General of the textile unions within the Force Ouvrière, and French textile employers whom he met at Caux. On an initial visit to Caux in 1949, Mercier 'observed that the employers of almost all countries, transported into this atmosphere, were reconsidering their original, outdated points of view and were more easily becoming conscious of their responsibility as men and as employers'.9 He himself had left the Communist Party when he saw the Resistance movement degenerate into petty jealousies and obscure intrigues after the war. The conference at Caux and a subsequent meeting with Buchman brought him a new perspective. 'Class war today', he said, 'means one half of humanity against the other half, each possessing a powerful arsenal of destruction.. . Not one cry of hatred, not one hour of work lost, not one drop of blood shed - that is the revolution to which Moral Re-Armament calls bosses and workers.'10

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