Page:Robert W. Dunn - American Company Unions.djvu/64

 courts of law against the real unions. They are also used in preventing organized labor from securing hearings before such bodies as the Railroad Labor Board and the boards under the new Railway Labor Act.

7. The company unions are propaganda agencies for the employers' political and economic program—the most effectual instruments of class collaboration and class oppression, and against any form of progressive or radical thought.

8. The company union strikes at the heart of the independent labor union, its standards and its struggles for wages, hours and conditions. It emphasizes non-essential "safety first movements, efficiency problems and handing bouquets to high officials."

9. The company union is under the control of the employer. He institutes it. He kills it when it has accomplished its purpose. It lives at his discretion and dies at his whim.

10. The company union is another aid to the blacklist and the spy system and leads to an intensification of exploitation which only a real labor union, militantly active, can ever begin to check.

It may be stated broadly that all company unions are inimical to the growth of trade unions. A few company unions may exist side by side with a certain kind of trade union "recognition"—that is, a company may recognize a narrow craft union among the skilled workers while applying a company union to the workers in the rest of its plant. A few company unions do not discriminate against active individual trade unionists. Most company unions do.

Furthermore most company committees can be fought successfully by the trade unions if the right