Page:Robert W. Dunn - American Company Unions.djvu/21

 Relations which studied the company unions in several plants in 1924 found among many of the workers a strong feeling against the works council. The workers told this committee in many instances that wages and conditions were still determined exclusively by management and that the only function of the company committees was to pass the wage cut on to the men, with the least disturbance. As one worker expressed it: "The company will give us just what it wants to give us, councils or no councils." We shall note later how really practical and useful the company association has been, in dozens of instances, in inducing workers to take wage reductions without resistance, if not without complaint.

All thru the literature dealing with the company unions we read of workers who, because of a "plan," refused to strike or, if they had struck, returned to work sooner than the rest of the workers in the community. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company's company union, which calls itself a "Republic," and its citizens, "Industrians," holds its meetings in a million-dollar club house. It reported some years ago with enthusiasm, "When a machinist strike was called in Akron recently, only 40 per cent of the Goodyear machinists responded. In a few weeks they returned to work." The "Republic" had functioned efficiently as a strike-breaking machine.

Indeed, so well is the main purpose of the company union understood to be the liquidation of labor unions and labor union strikes that a scribe for the New York Trust Company, commenting on the growth of the company union, said in 1925, "The rapid growth of works councils suggests the possibility that their development, by recognizing the