Page:Robert W. Dunn - American Company Unions.djvu/33

 mines," and that means that if a man is known to be active in the union, there is no work for him.

And the Rockefellerized steel workers of the Minnequa Steel Works of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company fare no better, as another report of the Sage Foundation discloses. Furthermore, the wages are even lower than for the coal miners, because there is no national union, even outside the works, to set basic standards of wage payments for the Minnequa workers. (The United States Steel Corporation establishes the basic wage standards in the industry).

This plan was inaugurated by the company in 1916. The indifferent workers, with no trade union experience, were simply talked or forced into it. A "president's industrial representative" was placed over them in charge of the operation of the plan. The decisions of the meetings are not mandates, but simply recommendations to the management which can throw them in the waste basket if it so desires. The workers are often afraid to appeal their grievances above the foreman. They have no way of knowing what the conditions are in other plants; they have to take the management's word for it. Altogether, their plight is the same, if not worse than that of the company unionized coal workers who help to swell the profits of the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

The Pullman Company, manufacturers and operators of the kind of railroad coaches workers do not use, has a record of anti-unionism that stretches back into the last quarter of the last century, beyond the strike of 1894, broken by government order. Labor spies, discharges for union