On the initiative of those who had met at Caux, certain textile managers and workers signed a national agreement on 1 February 1951 - the first in France since the war. It was also the first to guarantee to employees a share in the benefits of higher productivity. Six hundred thousand workers were immediately given large wage rises. The same year, on Mercier's initiative, eighty textile factory delegations made up of employers, workers and staff met at Moral Re-Armament conferences.

Two years later, on 9 June 1953, the textile employers and trades unions - except the Communist CGT - signed a solemn agreement 'in complete openness, in the common interests of workers, firms and country', which was the foundation-stone of a policy of co-operation for the next twenty years. Under it, textile workers were also the first in France to benefit from, among other things, a retirement pension scheme and partial unemployment benefit. A subsequent anti-inflation agreement was called by Prime Minister Antoine Pinay 'one of the first solid achievements on the road of the change which is indispensable to the economic survival of the country'. 11 It was not until 1968 that employers at a national level in other industries were obliged to grant their workers the same level of social benefits as the textile workers had been given voluntarily.

Buchman's part in helping towards such transformations generally came when people in industry met him at Caux, Mackinac or elsewhere. These were often people who were at the heart of major industrial battles in their countries. Thus in the summer of 1950 Dan Hurley, the Chairman of the National Amalgamated Stevedores and Dockers' Union in Britain, came to Caux. It had been he who had initiated the British dock strike in 1949 by declaring the Canadian ship Beaverbrae 'black' - a strike which was said to have cost the British economy the equivalent of the entire Marshall Aid received from America that year.

Hurley wrote to Buchman after getting home, 'My outlook has certainly adopted an entirely new aspect, and how much easier it has become to see the other fellow's point of view, and not to be for ever prepared to ram home the very aggressive doctrine which has been part of my policy for such a long time....Well, Frank, no matter how long it may be until we meet next, I shall always recall you as I last saw you, in your room, not infirm, but resting after a very hard day's work, which I suppose was a replica of your days since Caux opened. What a strain it must be teaching mankind an ideology, which by a great many like myself is approached with a good deal of suspicion, and yet with all that amount of strain that we fools impose upon you, you are able to look the most serene person I ever met.'12

431