Page:Robert W. Dunn - American Company Unions.djvu/42

 plan, you see, is strictly advisory. However, the ‘workers are the ones who receive the advice. The employers do the advising when it comes to vital questions like wages.

Take another example from the textile field, from that spy and blacklist ridden city, Passaic, N. J., and from that efficient union-smashing machine, the Forstmann & Huffmann Company, woolen and worsted goods manufacturers. "Mutual understanding, cooperation, and good will" is the slogan. The "Representative Assembly," elected from "wards," meets with the management four times a year. The annual dinner, a free spread by the company, takes up one of these occasions. Workers in the mill report that "company men" and espionage agents put themselves forward as candidates to "represent" the workers in the Assembly. They frequently get elected by having the illiterate Hungarian and Polish workers write their names or check numbers on the ballots. Any worker who is not close to the company has no chance of getting elected. An efficient card catalog blacklist system operated from a central employment office for all the woolen mills of Passaic, keeps out of the plant any workers suspected of relations with textile unions which have several times been beaten out of existence in the city.

"Why don't the workers take up their grievances with their 'ward representatives'?" one alert worker was asked. The answer was simple: "If he did he would get a double envelope in two weeks," which means he would be dropped from the payroll the next pay day. … Like under similar plans in other mills, the elections are held on company time and the worker is herded into line to drop a ballot in the box. The company agents circulate