A New Help to Labor Relations

Industrial Chaplains

In Lone Star, Texas this week, the Lone Star Steel Co. will open a new $40,000 building where the company will make no steel, transact no business. The building is a chapel. There, a fulltime, specially trained Methodist chaplain will spend his time primarily offering aid and counsel to troubled workers. Similar pastor-counselor or devotional programs are fast spreading to dozens of other U.S. corporations. Next week in Cleveland, a prime topic at the National Council of Churches meeting will be the new industrial chaplain. The Northern California Council has already drafted a program to spread the gospel of industrial chaplains as its "No. 1 objective for 1956."

The strongest argument in favor of industrial chaplains is made in the plants where they are already at work. North Carolina's Fieldcrest Mills started its program six years ago, and neither management nor workers has regretted the move. At Fieldcrest, the Rev. James K. McConnell visits sick workers, keeps in contact with retired employees, tours the plant daily and makes himself available to people who need help to solve their troubles. All counseling is strictly secret, strictly voluntary. Chaplain McConnell, a Southern Baptist, has an average of three counseling talks a day with Fieldcrest workers on problems ranging from alcoholism to unruly children. In the same manner, neighboring Reynolds Tobacco has been running a successful chaplain program since 1949 and thinks that it makes important business sense: absenteeism is down, production up, plant morale higher than before.

Le Tourneau, Inc. maintains full-time chaplains at both its Vicksburg, Miss, and Longview, Tex. plants for on-the-job spiritual guidance; the chaplains also hold weekly services which 85% of the workers attend. Tulsa's Sunray-Mid Continent Oil Co. has employed a chaplain since 1947, and his advice is so heavily in demand that he will soon get a second assistant. The story is the same at San Diego's Solar Aircraft, Dallas' John E. Mitchell Co., Dearborn Stove Co., Ohio's Pioneer Rubber Co. At Solar Aircraft, the program was so well liked that everyone from assistant plant managers to welders pitched in to build the Rev. Tipton L. Wood a chapel.

Despite the obvious successes, however, a good many critics challenge the idea. Some businessmen feel that chaplains are useful only in small, centralized plants, or question the whole idea of mixing business and religion. Many thoughtful churchmen also have reservations. They fear that too much time can be devoted to public relations, morale and production-boosting projects having little to do with religion; others worry that industrial chaplains steal away parishioners from established local pastors. But by far the biggest complaint comes from union leaders, who fear that management will use religion as a weapon against labor and to talk down justified complaints and demands. Said the Protestant Christian Century: "The first danger in a company-paid chaplaincy is that the chaplain may become a company-paid errand boy for bolstering company policy, pacifying complaints, playing on religious predilections to keep workers happy. The church should not condone such prostitution of its ministry."

To avoid this danger, most companies with formal, paid chaplains make sure that they take no part in formal management-worker problems, that they are there to give aid to troubled people, but not as representatives of the board of directors. At Kansas City's huge Swift & Co. plant, the Rev. Bernard W. Nelson is even paid by the union itself; he works alongside the men in the automotive division as an ordinary worker, and is strictly neutral on union-management squabbles. Yet he is convinced that production is up because of his counseling efforts. Says Baptist Chaplain Nelson: "Whenever you have 2,000 workers, you always have misunderstandings--most of them as petty as the dickens. I figure that by just sitting down and talking to the people and by showing them the problem can be solved without making a federal case of it, I get a lot done."

Most other chaplains also feel that they get a lot done. They feel that, in a mass-production civilization, they are more capable of helping workers with problems that pastors away from the factory might not fully understand. Furthermore, by being stationed in a plant, they are readily available to backslid churchgoers who might hesitate to consult a minister or priest. After going to an industrial chaplain for guidance, many a strayed sheep has returned to the flock. On their part, corporations have found that industrial chaplains are a distinct aid to morale, production, and the well-being of employees. Said Le Tourneau's Chaplain Barney Walker: "A man at peace with himself and the world around him is a good worker."

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