1. Commons, John R., “‘Welfare Work’ in a Great Industrial Plant,” Review of Reviews 28 (07 1903):79.Google ScholarThe key studies on fringe benefits in American firms include: Stanley Buder, , Pullman: An Experiment in industrial Order and Community Planning, 1880–1930 (New York, 1967);Google ScholarBrandes, Stuart D., American Welfare Capitalism, 1880–1940 (Chicago, 1976);Google ScholarBrody, David, “The Rise and Decline of Welfare Capitalism,” in Workers in Industrial America: Essays on the 20th Century Struggle, ed. Brody, David (New York. 1980);Google ScholarNelson, Daniel, Managers and Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory System in the United States, 1880–1920 (Madison, 1975);Google ScholarMcQuaid, Kim, A Response to Industrialism: Liberal Businessmen and the Evolving Spectrum of Capitalist Reform, 1886–1960 (New York, 1986);Google ScholarJacoby, Sanford M., Employing Bureaucracy: Managers, Unions, and the Transformation of Work in American Industry, 1900–1945 (New York, 1985);Google Scholarand Zahavi, Gerald, Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism: The Shoeworkers and Tanners of Endicott Johnson, 1890–1950 (Urbana, 1988).Google ScholarFor a recent review article, see: Gitelman, H. M., “Welfare Capitalism Reconsidered,” Labor History 33 (1992):5–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2. For benefit programs during the early industrial period, see Licht, Walter, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore, 1995), chaps. 1, 2.Google Scholar

3. For Pullman, see Buder, Pullman;Google Scholarfor Wanamaker and other benefit programs of the 1880s, see Licht, Walter, “Studying Work: Personnel Policies in Philadelphia Firms, 1850–1950,” in Masters to Managers: Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers, ed. Jacoby, Sanford M. (New York, 1991), 43–73.Google Scholar

4. The 1900–1930 period is well covered in Brandes, American Welfare Capitalism; Nelson, Managers and Workers; Brody, “The Rise and Decline of Welfare Capitalism”; McQuaid, A Response to Industrialism; Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, and Tone, The Business of Benevolence. On the meaning and impact of employee representation committees, see David Montgomery, “Industrial Democracy or Democracy in Industry? The Theory and Practice of the Labor Movement, 1870–1925,”Google Scholarand Harris, Howell John, “Industrial Democracy and Liberal Capitalism, 1890–1925,” both in Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise, ed. Lichtenstein, Nelson and Harris, Howell John (New York, 1993), 20–42 and 43–66.Google Scholar

5. Crawford, Margaret, Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London, 1995).Google Scholar

6. Special initiatives to recruit and retain labor in rural mill villages are richly detailed in numerous case studies for the North and the South. Key works include: Tucker, Barbara, Samuel Slater and the Origins of the American Textile Industry, 1790–1860 (Ithaca, 1984);Google ScholarPrude, Jonathan, The Coming of Industrial Order: Town and Factory Life in Rural Massachusetts; 1810–1860 (New York, 1983);Google ScholarWallace, Anthony F. C., Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution (New York, 1978);Google ScholarMcLaurin, Melton Alonza, Paternalism and Protest: Southern Cotton Mill Workers and Organized Labor, 1875 –1905 (Westport, 1971);Google Scholarand Hall, Jacquelyn Dowd et al. , Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (New York, 1989).Google ScholarFor a debate on the relationship between rural isolation, labor shortages, and company paternalism in England, see Huberman, Michael M., “The Economic Origins of Paternalism: Lancashire Cotton Spinning in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Social History 12 (1987):177–92;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand Rose, Mary, Taylor, Peter, and Winstanky, Michael J., “The Economic Origins of Paternalism: Some Objections,” Social History 14 (1989):89–98.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. The key work on the emergence of personnel management is Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy.Google Scholar

8. Gitelman, “Welfare Capitalism Reconsidered,” 26.Google Scholar

9. Zahavi, Workers, Managers, and Welfare Capitalism, chap. 4.Google Scholar

10. Jacoby, Modern Manors, 26–31.Google Scholar

11. Biographical treatments of leading business reformers are provided in McQuaid, A Response to Industrialism. See also Eggert, Gerald C., Steelmasters and Labor Reform, 1886–1923 (Pittsburgh, 1981),Google Scholarand Vrooman, David, Daniel Willard and Progressive Management on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad (Columbus, 1991).Google Scholar

12. Licht, Walter, “The Dialectics of Bureaucratization: The Case of Nineteenth-Century American Railway Workers,” in Life & Labor: Dimensions of American Working-Class Histoiy, ed. Stephenson, Charles and Asher, Robert (Albany, 1986), 93–114.Google ScholarInnovation with fringe benefit programs to reduce the control of foremen in France is discussed in Reid, Donald, “Industrial Paternalism: Discourse and Practice in Nineteenth-Century French Mining and Metallurgy,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (1985):579–607.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13. See Mitchell, Daniel, “Employers' Welfare Work: A 1913 BLS Report,” Monthly Labor Review 115 (1992):52–55;Google ScholarJacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 49; Tone, The Business of Benevolence, 52–65.Google Scholar

14. Gitelman, “Welfare Capitalism Reconsidered,” 22–31; Jacoby, Employing Bureaucracy, 199.Google Scholar

15. Tone, The Business of Benevolence, 87–88.Google Scholar

16. This essay deliberately avoids the debate raised by Eugene Genovese's use of the concept of paternalism to explain the nature of the slave experience on southern plantations; however, many of the points developed here could be applied to the study of work and labor relations on slave plantations. For two recent sociological treatments of paternalism that rebound off Genovese's arguments in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974),Google Scholarsee Jackman, Mary, The Velvet Glove: Paternalism and Conflict in Gender, Class, and Race Relations (Berkeley, 1994)Google Scholarand Padavic, Irene and Earnest, William R., “Paternalism as a Component of Managerial Strategy,” Social Science Journal 31 (1994):389–405.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

17. “Unsystematic” and “systematic” are the terms I employ in “Studying Work.” For the textile industry in the early industrial period, Philip Scranton has provided other labels for fringe benefit initiatives—“formal” (Lowell), “familial” (mill villages), and “fraternal” (urban shops): Scranton, Philip, “Varieties of Paternalism: Industrial Structure and the Social Relations of Production in American Textiles,” American Quarterly 36 (1984):235–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

18. Street, Paul, “Logic and Limits of ‘Plant Loyalty’: Black Workers, White Labor, and Corporate Racial Paternalism in Chicago's Stockyards, 1916–1949,” Journal of Social History 29 (1996):659–81;CrossRefGoogle ScholarWingerd, Mary Lethert, “Rethinking Paternalism: Power and Parochialism in a Southern Mill Village”, Journal of American History 83 (1996):872–902.CrossRefGoogle ScholarWorkers' shifting allegiances from benevolent employers to industrial unions are also a major theme in Cohen, Lizabeth, Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York, 1990).Google Scholar

19. Halpern, Rick, “The Iron Fist in the Velvet Glove: Welfare Capitalism in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1921–1933,” Journal of American Studies 26 (1992):159–83; Street, “Logic and Limits of ‘Plant Loyalty’”; Cohen, Making a New Deal.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

20. Tone, The Business of Benevolence, 73–78; Licht, “Studying Work,” 71–72.Google Scholar

21. Kolko, Gabriel, The Triumph of Conservatism: A Re-Interpretation of American History, 1900–1916 (New York, 1963);Google ScholarWeinstein, James, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston, 1968).Google Scholar

22. Lee Alston and Joseph Ferrie have presented a different interpretation of the relationship between “paternalism” and antistatism. They argue that southern congresspeople voted against federal welfare measures in the first half of the twentieth century to maintain the authority of southern landlords, who relied on their personal sway to control tenant farmers and sharecroppers. Federal programs had the potential to break the dependency relationship. Alston, Lee J. and Ferrie, Joseph P., “Labor Costs, Paternalism, and Loyalty in Southern Agriculture: A Constraint on the Growth of the Welfare State,” Journal of Economic History 45 (1985):95–117;CrossRefGoogle ScholarAlston, Lee J. and Ferrie, Joseph P., “Paternalism in Agricultural Labor Contracts in the U.S. South: Implications for the Growth of the Welfare State,” American Economic Review 83 (1993):857–76.Google Scholar

23. Fine, Lisa, “Our Big Factory Family': Masculinity and Paternalism at the Reo Motor Car Company of Lansing, Michigan,” Labor History 34 (1993):274–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

24. For the political nature of fringe benefit programs and personnel policies in general, see Licht, Walter, Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840–1950 (Cambridge, 1992), chap. 5.Google Scholar

25. For a review of recent supposed attempts at restructuring work, see Levine, David I., Reinventing the Workplace: How Business and Employees Can Both Win (Washington, D.C., 1996).Google Scholar

26. Business Week, October 17, 1994, 78.Google Scholar

27. The Nation's Business, May 1993, 61.Google Scholar

28. Newsweek, December 16, 1991, 46.Google Scholar