union men. To take care of the strikebreakers, boarded free on the company's property, the corporation has installed a representation system which is now in full blast. In spite of the expense entailed by the items mentioned above, the company's profits in 1924 amounted to $5,251,430. The company union has proved a thoroly profitable device—from the business point of view.
The United States Steel Corporation.
We mention U. S. Steel as an outstanding exception.[1] It has no company union. It doesn't need one. It has every other welfare wrinkle at work, purely, to use Judge Gary's own words, as "a business proposition." It is "old-fashioned" in some of its methods; up-to-date in others. Judge Gary and his Labor Department know other tricks that work as well as committees and which preserve the "military discipline" on which the corporation takes such pride. The blacklist and the discharges for union activity from which there is no appeal, operate in the corporation's mills.
The U. S. Steel autocracy is also important to a study of company unions because its wages determine the wages in every other steel mill, no matter how. much "discussion" there may be of wages and conditions in those other mills, or how extensive their plans for giving the workers the illusion that they are negotiating. From Colorado to Bethlehem, steel mills wait for Gary to decide
- ↑ Henry Ford might be mentioned as another. Henry has never gone in for committees and has rather worried the personnel managers by his backwardness in this respect. Being in no fear of trade unions, he replies realistically that "facts, not votes, decide technical questions." He thus lays bare the sham of many other employers who contend that their workers are being permitted a "say" over production questions. Ford's feudalism is strictly paternal and despotic, with certain welfare features added to assist in extracting the last penny of surplus value from his serfs.
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