Page:Robert W. Dunn - American Company Unions.djvu/29

 of committees dismissed, of union meetings prevented, of spies and espionage agents at work underground, of men intimidated into voting under the Plan. It is a story full of the rankest disregard of every principle phrased on the hypocritical lips of the company agents. … Even the company unions of other railroads point to the Pennsylvania Plan as autocratic and the committees as too "dependent" on the company's will! What the labor unions think of the Atterbury Plan need hardly be repeated to those who read the railroad workers' journals.

But not all the railroad workers' unions have faced this onslaught. The four train service brotherhoods have been notably immune. Their strength has saved them and their willingness to keep their mouths shut and watch a brother union drown. There is no doubt that Atterbury has sought to drive the wedge even deeper to break what tendency toward solidarity there may have been among railroad unions during the days of amalgamation agitation and the Plumb Plan League. To weaken the shop craft unions and the other newer unions whose growth was a wartime, mushroom affair, was Atterbury's purpose. To keep the aristocratic engineers, trainmen, conductors, and firemen—the skilled service group—apart from the others, was his end, and he and his banker friends have accomplished it to the detriment of the weaker unions and the whole labor movement.

Atterbury, and Elisha Lee, the Vice-President of the P. R. R., have boasted of their cordial relations with the Big Four Brotherhoods, who, they point out, have "gone along" with the Plan. The Big Four men will tell you they have simply kept their old bargaining arrangements but with some modifications, apparently to conform to the structure of the Plan. For we find the P. R. R. circu-