Business & Finance: Business Is a Team

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In the cream-colored, gold-trimmed Terrace Room of San Francisco's Fairmont Hotel last week, 500 stockholders of Hawaiian Pineapple Co., Ltd. (Dole products) sat in wide-eyed fascination. On the platform, in addition to a raft of dark-suited officers and directors, was a group of Hawaiian islanders decked out in bright and summery island garb. All were employees of the company; they were there to explain Hawaiian Pineapple's annual report to the stockholders.

Up stood pretty Mrs. Ethel Akiyama, 35, a Multigraph operator who has been with Hawaiian Pineapple for 20 years. She wore a pineapple-patterned dress and a white carnation lei, and she was barefooted. Said she earnestly: "Business is a team of people. Some of the people are stockholders; some are employees . . . All do their part to make the business a success." Aloha-shirted Mitsuma Miyazaki, a union shop steward, cautioned: "Profits are not guaranteed . . . and so for future needs we have earmarked $2,754,940."

This novel stockholders' meeting was the latest idea of Hawaiian Pineapple's President Henry Arthur White, who for the past four years has had his star employees explain the workings of Hawaiian Pineapple to their fellow workers (in Chinese, Japanese and English). This year he began flying his employees around the islands to see the different operations firsthand (TIME, April 24). The results were so successful that he decided to bring the employees to the mainland to tell the stockholders what they had learned.

The stockholders, who were served ice-cold pineapple juice during the meeting, seemed delighted. They were even more pleased by the profit charts on display. In the latest fiscal year, Hawaiian Pineapple netted a tidy $5,400,000, almost $1,000,000 more than the year before. Although the union, dominated by Communist Harry Bridges, denounced the employee explanation plan as a "company union" scheme, the employees like it. Not since 1947 has Hawaiian Pineapple been struck by Harry Bridges' union. Said Miyazaki in San Francisco last week: "It's a good company to work for."