ABSTRACT
On June 1, 1929, the Bat’a Company newspaper ran a front-page story on how the firm and the shoe industry worldwide were going to deal with a growing tariff crisis and a worldwide slowdown in sales. Remarkably for the Czech-speaking employees of the Bat’a Company, the story included a reproduction in English of an open letter from George F. Johnson, the co-owner and General Manager of the US company Endicott-Johnson (from here: EJ), one of the largest shoe manufacturers in the world, to his employees on the same topic. Johnson’s letter celebrated the workers of EJ, who had recently expressed loyalty to the company in a Home Coming Celebration, where thousands of employees and their families gathered to salute the “big family” of EJ at a time when “we (managers) have been forced to ask you to give up something.” This something was a cut in wages and a reduction in health-care services. 1 Bat’a used Johnson’s letter to stress to workers that hard times would be overcome through loyalty and sacrifice. Bat’a too was starting to see storm clouds on the horizon.
