VI
ORGANIZED LABOR'S RELATION TO THE
COMPANY UNION.
Labor's Argument.
Labor's case against the company union is implicit in all we have written above. Labor unions in America are against these trained seal unions for a hundred reasons some of which, tho overlapping, we can summarize in short order:
1. Under the company union the workers cannot be served by paid representatives of their own choosing—by the agents of the labor union.
2. The company union "representatives" are responsible to no one. They can "sell out" with impunity. The workers have no comeback. They are unorganized and without a treasury.
3. With two or three exceptions all company unions definitely forbid the existence or functioning of a real labor union among the workers covered by the company organizations.
4. The company union is without any economic power. It cannot strike. It has no funds, no independence, no connection with outside workers who might assist it in a struggle. Without this connection it can have no real bargaining power.
5. The company has every advantage in dealing with the company union. It has lawyers, personnel men, technicians, statisticians and labor relations advisors. The workers have no one comparable to face the corporation talent in a wage or other bargaining session. To call company union sessions with employers "negotiations" is to caricature the meaning of that word.
6. The company unions are used by the employers in getting injunctions against labor unions; their "contracts" with the corporations are used in 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.
Capturing the Company Union.
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 tactics are adopted and a militant policy followed. Among those who have been successful in struggles with the company union are W. Z. Foster and other left wing trade unionists who have been willing to take a chance on a real battle with the bosses. Foster refers to one company union at the Corn Products Company, a Rockefeller concern in Illinois, that was captured by the labor unionists. Another was the Fairbanks Company, washing powder manufacturers, while still another was the Cambria Steel Company at Johnstown, where a company union was instituted in a vain attempt to keep the workers out of the strike of 1919. The Bethlehem Steel Company in 1919 also put in one of its first "plans" for this purpose. This company committee was for a time captured by the labor unions but after the steel strike had failed the company won an influence over the men it has not since lost. Others, such as H. H. Broach, vice-president of the Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, who have enjoyed a wide experience in organizing work can recite examples of company unions that have been won over to the real union thru the vigorous efforts of trade unionists.