Page:Robert W. Dunn - American Company Unions.djvu/35

 In connection with the Pullman Plan it is interesting to note that workers strong enough organizationally to resist the Plan have been relieved of its hypocrisies. The Order of Sleeping Car Conductors refused to have anything to do with the Plan. It organized the Pullman conductors, and increased their wages 100 per cent. Otherwise it would be tied, gagged, and demoralized by the Plan, as are the Pullman porters who are beginning to turn to the real union. The farcical convention of company-bought porters which met in January, 1926, to grant the porters a microscopic wage increase has turned the men all the more toward the trade unions as they realize that the concessions made by the company are entirely due to the increasing strength of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Then we have the Mitten plan on the lines of the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company, one of the oldest and most widely discussed of all the schemes now in operation. The Cooperative Plan and the Cooperative Welfare Association, the first for "collective bargaining," the second for welfare and other activities, have together routed the union from these street railway lines and won what appears to be the undivided loyalty of many of the workers. The plan, as is well known, was introduced after the great street car strikes of 1909 and 1910 when the Mitten Management took over all the street car properties of the city. Since then the regular labor union has been out of the picture. The last flurry of union activity was in 1918 when the Amalgamated Association of Street and Electric Railway Employes attempted to call a strike without success.

The plan leaves the hire and fire control in Mr.