Page:Robert W. Dunn - American Company Unions.djvu/62

 associations of clerks and other crafts has been particularly energetic in this field. Its printing presses and mimeographs have knocked out tons of this type of propaganda.

Indeed it would be difficult to find a company union which has not been engaged in one way or another in furthering the capitalist view of society and preaching "sound economics" and "practical business" to the workers. This poison may be injected in several ways, three of which are:

1. Thru paid personnel experts who lecture the workers on orthodox business "fundamentals";

2. Thru the speeches and arguments of the company agents—foremen, lawyers, labor managers, and others in the committee meetings;

3. Thru the shop or house organ edited by a salaried company tool; the chief purpose of this organ is to divert the workers from consideration of economic problems by means of comic strips, sports, baby pictures, family items, et cetera. But a little "sound economics" is usually dropped in,—just as much as the worker can absorb, or stand, without throwing the journal away.

Perhaps foremost among the factors which make for the success of the company union—from the employers' point of view—is the possibility it opens for sowing the seeds of reactionary economic views among the workers. Even among those "industrial democracy" plans—such as the one at the Columbia Conserve Company—which are heralded by all good liberals and many socialists, we find personnel managers and plan experts taking about "foreign labor unions" and their "objectionable doctrine of class consciousness." It is to fight any manifestation of this class consciousness that these uplifters and social workers are employed by the "idealistic" Christian employers.