Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/793

 NEW YORK BUILDING TRADES PARALYSIS OF 1903 763

intendence almost the entire series of operations in any given piece of construction it undertakes, from the foundation up. Nearly all other building firms let out many branches of the work to sub-contractors ; and for the most part the class of concerns that do this are in the Employers' Association. The Fuller Com- pany was not a member of that association. In the past it has had less trouble with labor unions than most of its rivals, and it is even credited with having had a private personal understand- ing with Parks under which its work was supposed to be going on smoothly during the present controversy, while others, with almost the sole exception of the American Bridge Company, were blocked. The American Bridge Company has a regular agree- ment with Housesmiths' Union No. 2, but is not suspected of having any partiality for Parks. Its work has been held up wherever the chief or other associated contractors on any given piece of construction are members of the Employers' Association, since Parks's men, of course, refuse to work under the employers' arbitration plan. But the Fuller Company, it is asserted, having no sub-contracts to let and no connection with the Employers' Association, made Parks useful to it in a double sense. Its own work was kept manned with help, while every rival job on which Parks ordered a strike and crippled the contractor might be a plum for the Fuller basket.

It happens that at one time Parks was in the employ of the Fuller Company as a workman, and in his first trial for extortion it was sought to introduce testimony that he was still carried on the rolls of the Fuller Company as a paid agent to foment trouble throughout the building industry. This has yet to be proved, if indeed it can be proved at all. The writer of the severest attack that has yet been made, in a recent popular magazine, remarks on this point that he "could not find any specific evidence, even from the company's worst enemies, of this dastardly sort of warfare."

And it may be stated as not true that the Fuller Company has been exempt from trouble throughout the controversy. Its supposed independence of sub-contracts appears to be more of an ideal as yet than a fully accomplished reality ; and wherever