Page:Robert W. Dunn - American Company Unions.djvu/49

 of exploitation. No separate meetings of the employees are permitted. No separate spokesman is allowed. Joint Council meetings are called at the discretion of superintendents and with no regularity. Vital questions such as promotions, layoffs, transfers, and annuities, are considered "company business" not to be discussed by the council. The workers have only a shadowy right to appeal to 26 Broadway when such matters do not suit them. Discharges can be made for "cause" and this may be as wide a technicality as the superintendent cares to make it. The foremen, as under the Colorado plan, have not been tamed. They possess subtle and effective methods for intimidating the men and their "representatives." Pensions and stock ownership devices, depending upon length of service, hold the men to their jobs. To strike would be to lose all the "benefits" accumulated under these devices.

These are but a few of the plan provisions which bind the worker hand and foot to the company while giving him certain trivial "representation" privileges, and the "representatives" a chance to play at conference with the executives and to banquet once a year with the bosses.

In 1924 a request for a ten per cent wage increase was demanded and was immediately refused, by no means the first time this had occurred. There was some talk of striking and at a mass meeting of workers, called against company orders, one speaker declared that the company had "fairly swamped" them in conference with its statistics on the cost of living. "We could get nowhere," he lamented! Nothing happened.

No wonder Ralph M. Easley, life-tenure secretary of the National Civil Federation and pal of Sam Gompers and August Belmont could remark some years ago when the Standard plan was adopted: