Employees of the Remington Rand company began an 11-month strike action, during which time the company executives developed the notorious "Mohawk Valley formula" to intimidate the strikers.

Remington Rand, Inc. was an early American business machine manufacturer, originally a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers. Formed in 1927 following a merger, Remington Rand was a diversified conglomerate making other office equipment, electric shavers, etc. The Remington Rand Building at 315 Park Avenue South in New York City is a 20-floor skyscraper completed in 1911. After 1955, Remington Rand had a long series of mergers and acquisitions that eventually resulted in the formation of Unisys.

From May 1936 to April 1937, a strike against the Remington Rand company was conducted by a federal union affiliated with the American Federation of Labor (AFL). The strike settlement would not be fully implemented until mid-1940. The union had managed to organize six plants of the company, which were located in the towns of Tonawanda, Ilion and Syracuse in New York; in Middletown, Connecticut; and in Marietta and Norwood in Ohio.

The Mohawk Valley formula is a plan for strikebreaking purportedly written by the president of the Remington Rand company James Rand, Jr. around the time of the Remington Rand strike at Ilion, New York in 1936/37.