George Francis Johnson was an American businessman and shoe manufacturer. He was the president of a shoe company, Endicott-Johnson. It would become the largest manufacturer of footwear in the United States, employing 24, 000 workers at its peak producing 175, 000 pairs of shoes a day.
Background
Johnson was born on October 14, 1857, in Milford, Massachusetts, the third of the four sons and five children of Francis A. Johnson and Sarah Jane (Aldrich) Johnson. Both parents came of old New England working-class families; the father, recorded on his son's birth record as a teamster, had held many jobs, including that of a treer at a local boot factory.
Education
Johnson left school at the age of thirteen.
Career
In 1870, Johnson went to work for the Seaver Brothers boot factory in Ashland, Massachusetts. In 1881, after similar jobs in other Massachusetts towns, he moved to Binghamton, New York, and became manager of the treeing room of the Lester Brothers Boot Factory. He soon gained a reputation as an innovative leader, and in 1890, when Henry B. Endicott, a wealthy Bostonian, secured control of the firm, Johnson was made production and sales manager. So successful was he that in 1899 Endicott allowed him to buy a half-interest in the company.
The Endicott-Johnson firm was incorporated in 1919, and the following year, after Endicott's death, Johnson became president. From his earliest working days Johnson had viewed labor and capital as partners, and as an entrepreneur he became a leading exponent of industrial democracy and "welfare capitalism. " The employment policies he worked out became widely known. Johnson envisioned the ideal factory as a "shop out in the open country, with the homes of the workers around it in a little village. " Thus the company built factories in the rural areas west of Binghamton and established towns which eventually became Johnson City and Endicott. The company constructed several thousand houses, which it encouraged workers to purchase by making mortgages readily available; it also supplied utilities, libraries, schools, stores, and recreational facilities like the "EnJoie Health" Golf Club. Johnson himself lived among his workers, and a democratic atmosphere prevailed at the plant. Workers had direct access to "George F. ," as they called him, and within limits they could choose their own hours of work.
In terms of economic benefits, Endicott-Johnson employees enjoyed a significant advantage. Johnson, who believed the term "living wage" was often synonymous with mere subsistence, consistently paid the highest salaries in the shoe industry; even during the depression of the 1930's he could boast that his wages were competitive with those of Henry Ford. In 1916 Endicott-Johnson became the first shoe manufacturer to adopt the eight-hour day and the forty-eight-hour week, and two years later it was among the first companies in the country to institute free, comprehensive medical care for employees and their families. In 1919 Johnson inaugurated a unique profit-sharing plan in which all workers and executives benefited equally, their shares dependent solely on the number of weeks worked during the previous year.
The company's approach to labor-management relations appealed to Thomas J. Watson, founder of the International Business Machines Corporation, who in 1924 was persuaded by Johnson to build his first factory in Endicott, and Watson for years followed similar policies as an employer.
In 1930 he relinquished the presidency of the Endicott-Johnson Corporation to his son George and took the position of chairman of the board. He suffered a heart attack in 1937 and retired two years later, but lived beyond the age of ninety, when he died in Endicott of a second heart attack. He was buried in that community's Riverhurst Cemetery.
Achievements
Religion
Reared as a Methodist, Johnson disliked sectarian divisions and often attended Roman Catholic services with his second wife.
Politics
Johnson was as unorthodox in his political views as he was in business. An independent, he endorsed the presidential candidacies of Woodrow Wilson and Alfred E. Smith and had little use for Calvin Coolidge. He supported Franklin D. Roosevelt as governor of New York and later favored much of the New Deal. Believing that "unholy" corporate profits and underconsumption - rather than overproduction - had caused the depression, he supported measures tending to produce a more equitable distribution of wealth. He championed the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and its codes of fair practice, and was one of the first businessmen to display the NRA "Blue Eagle. " During the depression he managed to keep most of his workers employed by reducing working hours, and he gave free meals to the unemployed in the company's dining rooms. Johnson's natural antipathy to compulsory collective bargaining made him a foe of the NRA's labor code and of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935; yet in 1936 he supported Roosevelt for reelection.
Views
Johnson's response to labor unions was ambivalent. He regarded them as a necessary means to redress workers' grievances against unfair employers, but felt that in a community-oriented shop like Endicott-Johnson they would be a disruptive force. The strength of the goodwill and loyalty generated by Johnson's paternalistic policies was revealed in 1940, when his employees voted by a five-to-one margin not to join a union.
Connections
Johnson married Lucy Anna Willis of Braintree, Massachusetts, on December 22, 1876. They had five children: Walter L. , George W. , Zaida, Irma, and Ernest. This marriage ended in divorce, and he later married Mary Ann McGlone in Binghamton, New York; they had one child, Esther Lillian.