While the President of the Knox Hat Company brings out the same development:
"Grievances of the personal type such as those having to do with wages, hours of work, working conditions, and so on, have practically ceased. Those that the council now discusses are more likely to do with tools and machinery of production. … That, of course, suits us perfectly, for it means greater production and lower costs."
IV
SPECIMENS.
To give the reader a close-up of company unions, and a better understanding of the employers' objectives, let us sketch briefly a few of them. We have already noted that there are endless varieties of plans. Attempts have been made to classify them according to form, structure, degree of "control" permitted the worker, and by other arbitrary standards. We leave aside these hair-splitting distinctions based upon analysis of constitutions and by-laws. We describe the plans with a view to showing what they have meant in terms of anti-trade unionism, in the only terms the average employer can comprehend. The class-conscious corporation manager asks of the company union one major favor, "Rid my plant of the union"; or, "Keep that union out of my shop." Those workers who have had intimate experience with the company union may consider the following examples all too inadequate to illustrate this one underlying motive of the capitalist. However, these random examples suggest the intensity of the struggle between the trade union and the company unions and the main characteristics of the latter. And in non-union industries, where few workers have ever been permanently organized, these examples will suggest the methods used to cultivate this most subtle and paternalistic instrument of exploitation.
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