activity, merciless exploitation, all are recorded in the pages of the report of the Industrial Relations Commission, (1916). … With these conditions still in existence, the Pullman Company attempts to veneer its crimes with a coat of pure paternalism. The employee representation plan, adopted in 1920, is the result.
The Pullman Plan is run from the Pullman office and by its labor department. It promises no discrimination for unionists. Actually it has discharged some of the best men in its service for activity in the interest of the workers. Totten, Lancaster, and others, now connected with the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, are among those who for a while tried to use the plan to secure some benefits for their fellow workers. The Pullman bosses rewarded them by putting them off their cars. The company forces 12,000 porters to use the plan and vote for representatives. It intimidates, penalizes, frames up, and discharges those who question its motives or who try to make the plan useful to the mass of the porters.
When the more intelligent workers, seeing the hollowness of the plan, turn against it and try to tie up with the labor movement, the company hires Negro attorneys, clergymen, and politicians to attack the real union and extol the company plan. They buy up colored newspapers, pass out thousands of dollars for advertising space, speed up their espionage system, and fight with every means, fair and foul, to down the workers who, thru experience, have learned that the plan is a hoax and a fraud. Closely associated with the plan is a Benefit Association, not a cent of the funds of which can be expended without a company O. K. The officers are all "company men" or "welfare worker" stool pigeons who have been bought off by the company to betray their brothers.
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