Word: dow
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...just about everything Dow's people need, Dow provides for them--right there. Dow has its own 131-man police force, its own 20-bed hospital, two fire stations, and a mammoth cafeteria for its 12,000 employees. It seems, in fact, that a person can spend his whole life fenced within Dow's plant, at no great physical inconvenience--if he can learn to tolerate the smoke...
After talking with Dow's people (at least the people we met, most of whom were PR types) one might be excused for thinking that they had, in fact, spent their whole lives inside the plant. Except, of course, when they drove to nearby Saginaw Tri-City Airport to catch a flight to one of Dow's several hundred other plants and sales offices around the nation and the world...
They all sounded alike. All honest about their faith in the market system. All exuberant about the tremendous value of this dialogue with concerned young people. All extraordinarily proud of Dow. In pairs, they tended to play straight man for one another, laughing at each other's jokes. And they all kept repeating how wonderful it was that at Dow every man was free to think for himself...
Early in the day, one of Dow's public relations men told us in a short speech that Dow knew there was going to be something of a communications gap. If he thought we would leave Midland unfairly equating Dow in our minds with the German munitions-makers, he was wrong. But we, at least I, hadn't arrived at Midland with that impression in the first place...
There was a gap, but it was a barrier far more formidable than the barbed wire fence where a Dow guard takes away your camera while you go on your tour of the plant. It was a gap between people who enjoyed working for a profit, who accepted money flow as a measure of their success, and people like me who felt uncomfortable all day with the idea...