Recognizing the Company Union
IF President Roosevelt were psychoanalyzed, his labor policy, with its apparent contradictions and paradoxes, would be more understandable than it is to-day. Clearly, the fact stands out that human suffering, in any form, he cannot view objectively. Reports of unemployment, of human decay and retrogression in West Virginia and the Tennessee Valley, of irate workers battering at the gates of closing factories, of women and children starving, stir in him the bitter memories of his own physical pains, of his own physical and spiritual sufferings. The labor clause of the NIRA bore the marks of a purpose to help the laborer, ‘the Forgotten Man,’ in the apt but carelessly inaccurate language of the President — but who was, rather, the defeated man, the frightened man, who after four years of depression found himself psychologically a permanently unemployed man.
I
It was sentimentality that dictated the phrase in Section 7 of the NIRA that laborers be given the ‘right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing.’ In fact, there was so much sentimentality in the atmosphere during the honeymoon period that no one, not even the capitalists, noticed the ambiguities in the section. Who are laborers in the United States? Does the word mean industrial laborers only? What is meant by ‘collective bargaining’? Does it mean that laborers in a single shop shall organize a committee to bargain collectively with their employers, or does it mean that all laborers throughout the United States shall organize a syndicate or a Soviet, or through the American Federation of Labor shall bargain with an association of all employers of labor in the United States? Or did the President have in mind that collective bargaining was to be done through government agencies?
The confusion of ideas inherent in an undefined ‘collective bargaining’ became apparent at once, for every possible interpretation was immediately given the term, and the President and his advisers seemed to switch from one definition to another. Throughout the second Congressional period of Mr. Roosevelt’s term, when the Wagner Bill was before Congress, some legal definition, capable of being upheld by the Supreme Court, was urgently needed to save the Executive from the constant necessity of seesawing from a pro-A. F. of L. attitude to a proCompany Union attitude.
It was this confusion and sentimentality which resulted in an increase in strikes after June 1933. According to the World Economic Review for 1933, published by the Department of Commerce: —
In that month only half a million mandays were lost as a result of strikes, but by October the number of days lost equaled more than 3.6 millions. The National Labor Board was treated on August 5, 1933, to act as arbitrator in strikes and by December 13 had taken jurisdiction of 155 disputes, involving 350,000 workers. Including Regional Board cases, the number of employees involved was estimated by the National Labor Board to have been about 600,000. The minimum wages set in the various codes that were adopted were mainly beneficial to the very low-paid workers, and generally the skilled workers were left to bargain for higher wages. Most of the strikes were caused by demands for higher than code wages, recognition of the unions, and alleged violations of the codes by employers.
This statement does not cover the Toledo strike, the textile strike, the Minneapolis strike, the threatened steel strike, the Harriman strike in the South. It does not include the general strike in San Francisco, spreading what General Johnson called civil war on the whole Pacific Coast.
In a word, government insistence upon ‘collective bargaining’ without defining the term, without applying adequate organization for the process, without placing limitations upon the rights of labor and capital, added to the misery of the labor situation just at the moment, curiously enough, when it appeared that reëmployment might occur in the United States.
For, if either the American Federation of Labor estimates or the Federal Reserve Board indices be employed, it is clear that after June 1932 a movement toward reëmployment was beginning to make itself felt, and that by March 1933 it was well on the rise; but toward the last quarter of 1933 ‘downward tendencies were prevailing, the increase in private unemployment being about half a million,’ according to the Department of Commerce report. Except as government agencies like the CWA and the PWA employed men, reemployment has been slight in 1934, in spite of huge government expenditures for goods and public stimulation of prosperity. Nevertheless pay rolls increased both in 1933 and in 1934, because of the higher wages paid under the NRA codes. It was, in fact, characteristic of this period, and still is characteristic, that those who actually work in industry are better paid than at any time since 1929, but that the number of unemployed, excluding government employment, remains fairly stationary in the neighborhood of ten million.
In this situation, the term ‘collective bargaining’ begins to have a special meaning. Ordinarily, American labor being on the whole rather unskilled in character, capital could obtain labor at varying prices, in a market that was overflowing with unemployed. In fact, under such conditions, capital might have found it cheaper to increase the number of men employed than to install new labor-saving devices. The employed laborers sought definitely to avoid being swamped by a deluge of workers seeking jobs, and the collective-bargaining clause gave them, under the NRA and the President’s Reëmployment Agreement, the exact mechanism to establish a vested interest in their jobs.
Thus the first effect of the President’s effort to end unemployment seemed to be to give the employed worker a means to protect his job both from the unemployed worker who might take it at a smaller wage and against the capitalist who might hire two men at one man’s pay. No matter how one analyzes the purposes, motives, and achievements of the NIRA and the reëmployment agencies let loose by the government, the Act accomplished just this: it fixed the minimum wage and set a numerical maximum for reëmployment in the conditions of the present market.
Conscious of this danger, the government sought to employ surplus labor itself in the CCC, the CWA, and the PWA. From the point of view of this study, this particular work of the government, apart from creating an artificial market for goods, served only to set a minimum wage which industry had to better. For instance, I was told this story the other day by a country banker in Massachusetts. He said that a customer of his offered a man a job at sixteen dollars a week. The man refused it on the ground that he would not take a job for one dollar a week.
‘What do you mean, one dollar a week? ’ the prospective employer asked.
‘Well,’ replied the man, ‘I can get fifteen dollars a week doing nothing for the government on a road job, which ain’t work. Here you offer me another dollar a week to do real hard work. Why should I take it?’
Now that was the exact effect of these agencies — they set a minimum wage for the employed, whether employed privately or publicly. But they gave those privately employed the weapon of collective bargaining, guaranteed but not defined by the government.
II
President William Green of the American Federation of Labor did have a definition for the collective-bargaining clause of the NIRA. In his speech at Akron, on September 4, he said: —
The National Recovery Act can be properly classified as revolutionary legislation because it confers . . . upon labor the right to organize without interference or restraint by employers of labor and to bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing. It further stipulates that no employee shall be required to join a company union as a condition of employment.
Later in this same speech he said: —
If industry is permitted to organize and control business, labor likewise must be permitted to organize for mutual helpfulness and protection. And labor is doing that very thing. The spirit of organization has been aroused and the workers are exercising the right conferred upon them in Section 7(a) of the National Recovery Act to organize. ... It is the purpose and intent of the American Federation of Labor to protect workers in the exercise of their right to organize and to invoke punishment, through proper court procedure, upon those employers who are charged with and found guilty of violating the law. . . . The great labor organization which I have the honor to represent serves as a medium through which the workers of the nation may give expression to their hopes and ideals. . . . In conformity with the traditional policy of the organized labor movement, we offer coöperation through organization and collective bargaining. Such an attitude, in my judgment, represents the spirit as well as the letter of the National Recovery Act.
Thus the A. F. of L. made its attitude toward this phase of NRA policy perfectly clear. Section 7(a) of the NIRA recognizes the principle of collective bargaining; the Federation asserts that it is the medium for collective bargaining and insists that this is the meaning of the law. It is true that on August 23 a statement signed by General Johnson and Donald R. Richberg had denounced this interpretation and the Federation’s assumptions. They insisted that only they and the courts could decide what Section 7(a) meant, and that ‘no one else can assume this function.’ ‘The words “open shop" and “closed shop,’” they wrote, “are not used in the law and cannot be written into the law.’
But to the members of the A. F. of L. and to most organized laborers their attitude represented political hedging. The A. F. of L. proceeded to organize for strikes in support of collective bargaining with themselves as the medium for collective bargaining. So it happened that Section 7(a) stimulated a class war, an industrial war, in which there has been bloodshed, over the single issue: Was it the intent of the framers of the NIRA, before political developments caused them to change their minds, to make the A. F. of L. an arm of government, an agency of government for collective bargaining?
This question the Administration felt it unwise to answer directly; the Federation’s challenge was supported by continual strikes. It is true that the strikes immediately after the World War were larger both in the number of men who struck and in the man-days out, but when one remembers the ten million still out of work and the millions of dollars that the government is spending to maintain industrial peace, then the strike situation appears as ugly to-day and as dangerous as it was in 1919. Then it was over wages and hours; to-day it is over the interpretation of the collective-bargaining clause of the NIRA. Then it was the result of post-war readjustments; to-day it is the result of the government’s attempt to enforce collective bargaining and its vacillating unwillingness to define the meaning of the term.
The Administration’s switching back and forth, now seeming to recognize the A. F. of L., now rejecting it, has frightened the workers who belong to company unions, while at the same time it has disgruntled the workers who belong to the Federation. Miss Mary van Kleeck of the Russell Sage Foundation, who resigned from an NRA committee dissatisfied with its labor rulings, said at the National Conference of Social Work in May, ’Its net effect upon the workers’ struggle for security has been to raise high hopes, followed by bitter disappointment. The collective-bargaining clause was a new Magna Charta to organized labor, but [it] has not been sustained by the Roosevelt Administration.’ That undoubtedly and succinctly states the attitude of those who expected the A. F. of L. to become a sort of Soviet alongside the American Government, a Smolny Institute functioning simultaneously with a Kerensky régime. Their disappointment and despair are fierce; their annoyance is expressed in constant strikes.
There can be little doubt that in the beginning the Administration expected to wipe out the company union and to stand by the Federation. But that proved impractical, for the workers in the country’s principal industries were not in the Federation. In these industries, capital has been able to prove that its own workers are not dissatisfied and that they do not want to join the Federation. Capital’s demand that the Federation produce its membership rolls could not be met by the Federation because, in such an industry as steel, the number of workers who were members would have been too small compared with the membership in the company unions. Mr. Roosevelt was faced with the dilemma of either forcing all American workers to join the American Federation of Labor or abandoning the fight on the company union. It was easier to ditch the Federation and to depend on local police and tear gas to see the count ry through a period of industrial strife. It would have been still easier to find out the facts and to analyze the situation before Section 7(a) of the NIRA was passed by Congress. There would then have been no need for workers to picket the NRA building with signs bearing the inscription, ‘What about 7A Johnson! ’
III
Early during the Seventy-third Congress it was realized by the Administration and by Senator Robert Wagner of New York, who had assumed the rôle of administrator of Section 7(a) of the NIRA while still a member of the Senate, that a measure was necessary to avoid strikes under Section 7(a). Here again an awkward problem arose, for labor could not give up its right to strike without sacrificing the single weapon which throughout the history of modern industrialism had proved adequately coercive to gain the ends which justified the existence of tradeunionism. Deprived of the right to strike, organized labor ceases to have any means of asserting its strength except through the courts, which are not always time-conscious — that is, they lag behind the social changes often by as much as a generation, sometimes by several generations.
It is true that in Italy and Germany labor has lost the right to strike under a Fascist system, but Fascism guarantees to labor a social equality with capital by the system of class equalization in the corporate state. Similarly, in Soviet Russia the strike is impossible because the government itself is theoretically a dictatorship of the proletariat — that is, labor controls the state and the state exists for labor. Capital, in the sense that we know it, does not exist in the Soviet State; the state itself is the sole depository of the total capital of the country; the state is the worker, the peasant, and the soldier.
Either under Fascism or under Communism, the strike is an act of treason against the state. It is an uprising. Striking workers are shot down as rebels. Picketing is counter-revolution. Even an expression of opinion concerning labor conditions may be regarded by the rulers of Italy, Germany, or Soviet Russia as bordering on resistance to the government, and might lead either to the concentration camp or, not impossibly, to death.
In the American democracy, the right to strike and to picket has generally been upheld by the law and the courts. Perhaps the best statement of labor on this subject was made by the brilliant Secretary-Treasurer of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, Joseph Schlossberg, who said: — Every strike . . . even the smallest craft strike, is fundamentally a social protest. It is a challenge to the existing order. . . . In a sense, a strike resulting in the improvement of working conditions tends to stabilize the capitalist order, because it makes that order more bearable, or less unbearable, for the workers. In this sense the legalization of the strike is a safety valve for capitalism. Without such legislation every strike would be a violent social revolt. . . .
Many well-meaning people have been diligently searching for something to replace the strike. The answer of history is that nothing replaces the strike. The strike is the only real weapon the workers have and they could not give it up if they would. If the workers should, assuming that possibility, make a final and complete surrender of their right to strike, the working conditions following as a consequence of surrender would bring the very opposite results — a violent strike. If strikes should be forbidden by law, there will be illegal strikes. Strikes may be broken through persecution or repression, but by no method can the strike be abolished. The strike is a social corrective which cannot be eliminated.
General Johnson in his San Francisco speech upheld the right of workers to strike, but denounced the general strike as civil war. It is difficult to understand why, if a few workers strike, their conduct is altogether American, but, if all strike, it is un-American. It would appear from this speech that the Administration has not yet clarified its attitude toward the principle of the strike.
IV
The question then arose, under both the NIRA and the proposed Wagner Bill, whether labor could continue to use its weapon, the strike. On this subject workers of the A. F. of L., of company unions, and of Communist unions were at one: they could not give up the weapon. Once, obscurely in the daily press, Senator Wagner was reported to have said that his bill did not withdraw from labor this right. Employers, nevertheless, were opposed to the bill because it would impose upon them a complete and binding government control of industrial relations, so that neither capital, labor, nor management would have any voice whatsoever in determining any vital question in this field. The bill gave to the majority of employees the right to determine which union was to be the agency of collective bargaining in a plant, but no means were provided to protect the worker who did not choose to belong to the majority union. He might be coerced and even driven out of his job.
It is difficult, no matter how objective one desires to be, to see anything else in this bill but an attempt to force the whole of American labor, by act of Congress and by the machinery of a Federal Board, into the American Federation of Labor. It was clearly an attempt to exterminate the company union, while avoiding strikes by government intervention through a quasijudicial body which had only to discover that an employer had sought to influence his workers to have justifiable ground under the law to declare him guilty of an unfair practice.
From the beginning it was apparent that the real danger to both capital and labor in the Labor Disputes Act (the Wagner Bill) lay in the unlimited powers given to the proposed National Industrial Adjustment Board — a partisan, not a judicial, body — to regulate industrial relations for the entire country, acting as a combined Ministry of Labor and Labor Court in a Fascist country, and in the destruction of existing agencies in industry which aim to stimulate friendly coöperation between capital and labor within an industry. Under the bill there would be a board composed of three members to represent the public, one member for the employers, one for labor, all appointed by the President in the usual manner. The board was to enforce its rulings against unfair practices when these were called to its attention by the Secretary of Labor. The aim of the bill can be briefly put: an employer could use no means to prevent his employees from joining any type of union the individual workers might choose to join, but the employees must not join a company-dominated union. Now the clarity of that idea is like that of a stream after a typhoon has churned its waters. Just how is a Federal Board to determine at what point a company union is dominated by a company? Suppose there is an agreement between management and labor for a contribution to the union, or for management to take union dues out of the weekly pay roll; does that involve domination or mere friendliness? And is it domination when done for a company union and friendliness when done for an A. F. of L. union? The dangers of conflict on this single point give one a sense of what Pandora’s box may prove to hold if it is opened.
But both sides were to be protected by judicial review in the Circuit Court of Appeals, which was to have final jurisdiction. This raised a fine constitutional point, for the question was asked, and quite rightly: Why, under the American Constitution, should appeals be limited by any act of Congress until the whole route of ‘due process of law ‘ has been traveled — that is, until the United States Supreme Court has exhausted the rights of the individual under the Constitution?
V
In the end the Wagner Bill was shelved. It aroused so much protest from industry that the President refused it his support. For the situation in the country had changed. A year of the New Deal, nine months of the NRA, failure to reemploy ten million hands, resistance to boom propaganda, inability to maintain a general high price level, discontent among the employed workers, a less frightened attitude on the part of capital, a few unfavorable court decisions — all these have made the nation critical, if not of the President, at any rate of some of his policies and of the personnel of administration. The Wagner Bill would have been passed unread, as so many other bills were, during the honeymoon. By the early summer of 1934 even unorganized labor was raising its head and declining, as in the steel industry, to be coerced into joining the American Federation of Labor. It would seem that the characteristic American resistance to whittling away the capitalist structure by agitation and revolutionary propaganda is again asserting itself in the struggle within the labor movement for power. The failure of the Wagner Bill definitely eliminates, for the present at any rate, the possibility of forcing by government fiat the whole of American labor into one big union.
A substitute emergency measure, which is to have only one year of life, was passed during the last days of Congress, after blood had been spilled and ‘vomiting’ gas used in labor wars in various parts of the country. There was, at the moment, danger of a vicious steel strike; a longshoreman’s strike was taking place on the Pacific Coast which was particularly nasty; smaller strikes were increasing in number throughout the country; Congress wanted to go home, and the President looked forward to the delights of Waikiki.
In those circumstances and in that atmosphere a measure was passed authorizing the President to appoint a ‘National Labor Relations Board,’ which is empowered ‘to investigate issues, facts, practices and activities of employers or employees in any controversy arising under Section 7(a) of the N1RA or which are burdening or obstructing or threatening to burden or obstruct the free flow of interstate commerce.’ The board is authorized further to conduct elections to determine the type of organization which workers in any plant desire to have operate for them as the agency for collective bargaining. Such elections are to be by secret ballot. It would appear from the act, perhaps only after a judicial interpretation, that just as the employer is not permitted in any way to influence such a ballot, so may not the American Federation of Labor or any other organization interfere with, influence, or cajole workers in their exercise of this ballot.
The board may also hold hearings in connection with a dispute or a charge of discrimination, and act as a Board of Voluntary Arbitration when invited to do so by the parties to a dispute. In this connection, it is difficult to discover that the board has any powers which the Department of Labor has not enjoyed for many years. In fact, it would appear from the order establishing the new board that it is subordinated to the Department of Labor, for its recommendations to the President must be made through the Secretary of Labor, who can, of course, if she be so minded, pocket them and forget which pocket she used — if she uses pockets. Senator Wagner’s National Labor Board is disbanded, and the New York Senator passes out of the picture as a labor tsar of the United States.
VI
Hidden away in the President’s order establishing the new board is a small paragraph marked with a small c. This paragraph is so tremendously telling that it is here given in full: —
The National Labor Relations Board may decline to take cognizance of any labor dispute where there is another means of settlement provided for by agreement, industrial code, or law which has not been utilized.
Now this paragraph is a concession to capital, for it means unmistakably that if management and labor in any industry can make a deal which is satisfactory to themselves, even though it be antagonistic to the American Federation of Labor, the board should not interfere. It is this paragraph which gives official recognition to the company union, and in the course of the next year the American Federation of Labor will doubtless fight hard to prevent this paragraph from reducing its membership to what it was in 1929.
To offset this indirect, dubiously stated recognition of the company union, paragraph F — full capital — states:—
Nothing in this order shall prevent, impede or diminish in any way the right of employees to strike or engage in other concerted activities.
This, of course, wipes out the whole purpose of the act, which is to prevent strikes. It is the very last paragraph in the Executive Order, and stands out boldly above the President’s name and seems to say: ‘We’ve done the best we can; now you do your share.’
The act was designed to please everyone. The capitalists won their point, which was to deal with their own workers by continuing the device of the company union. The A. F. of L. can continue to call strikes. Honest citizens can witness the spectacle of disputes and hearings. The Department of Labor goes on with its work as heretofore, the new board using departmental employees as mediators and investigators. The phrase ‘collective bargaining’ is still indefinite and undefined. And — the maintenance of law and order remains with the local police and the courts. Everyone is satisfied, nothing is changed, and the entire transaction has the benediction of Congress. Politically, it was a master stroke to get this business out of the way. Fundamentally, the labor war is still with us.
VII
The basic American industry is steel, and steel has never been unionized. At one time the I. W. W. tried to organise the workers of this industry, and the A. F. of L. helped break the Leftist union in the interests of the capitalists. As long as the steel workers remain outside of the A. F. of L., it is not to be expected that motor-car workers can be brought in. It was logical, then, for the American Federation of Labor to train its heavy artillery on the steel industry with the objective of destroying the company unions forever, not only in that industry but throughout the country. The Federation reasoned that Section 7(a) of the NIRA either applies to the steel industry or becomes nonexistent, and, be it repeated, the Federation interpreted that section as recognizing it as the sole medium for collective bargaining.
John Weir of the Weirton Steel Company was the hero or villain of the drama, for he took it upon himself to fight this issue in the courts. In the course of his fight with the government concerning the application of the NIRA to his industry, the government, forced by the strike situation, sued out an injunction to prevent Weir from pursuing ’unfair practices.’ Weir invoked the Norris—La Guardia antiinjunction law, heretofore a weapon of organized labor, to attack the validity of Section 7(a) of the NIRA. His attorneys insisted that ’the code was passed for the workingman, not the American Federation of Labor. They insisted that their workers favored the company union. In fact, they denounced the legality, the constitutionality, of the NIRA, and, to sustain their contention, quoted the words of the liberal Justice Holmes: —
We are in danger of forgetting that a strong public desire to improve the public condition is not enough to warrant achieving the desire by a shorter cut than the constitutional way of paying for the change.
Judge John P. Nields, in the Federal District Court in Wilmington, Delaware, sustained the position of the Weirton Company. Thus the NRA’s attempt to impose the A. F. of L. upon the steel industry failed. This was the third failure, for the A. F. of L. had failed in the motor-car strike in Detroit and in the Toledo strike. But the Weirton decision is important because it is judicial and indicates the attitude of the courts, already noted in the decision of Federal District Court Judge Charles I. Dawson of Louisville, Kentucky, who temporarily enjoined the government from forcing bituminouscoal operators to abide by a code which they opposed.
The Administration, Senator Wagner, and the steel operators realized that they could not go behind Judge Nields’s decision without testing the constitutionality of the NIRA, particularly in its labor provisions. The American Federation of Labor recognized that it could no longer look for government support and would have to resort to the strike as the only weapon.
A ‘rank and file’ committee of steel workers now took the ease in hand and petitioned the President directly, objecting to a proposed revision of the steel code. They threatened a strike by June 16. Meanwhile John Weir announced that a poll of his workers showed 9801 against the strike as compared with 460 for it — 95.5 per cent standing by Weir and the company union. The steel capitalists stood firm, believing that they could depend on most of their 430,000 workers not to strike because no issue existed between capital and labor in the industry.
During the month of June, 1934, the agitation continued, not among the workers, but among government officials, NRA officials, labor leaders, and steel-institute officials. The strike was constantly being postponed and a new date set. The capitalists suggested an impartial industrial-relations board, which labor rejected on the ground that it would not be an impartial board, that it could not be in the circumstances.
Without the support of the Administration, the American Federation of Labor found itself weak and helpless. It dared not call a strike, lest John Weir’s figures should prove to be correct, lest it should become clear that the steel workers were really in favor of the company unions. By June 28, the strike was called off and the President created a National Steel Labor Relations Board by Executive Order, which, in effect, was given no powers which did not already exist in other government departments. It was a temporary face-saving device used to placate organized labor.
Thus ended what gave every prospect of being the crucial battle for power by the American Federation of Labor. Had a steel strike been fought and won, the A. F. of L. must have become the sole agency for collective bargaining in the country. But the issue and the proposed strike were lost. The A. F. of L. came out of this struggle defeated and weakened.
VIII
This cannot mark the end of the attempt by the American Federation of Labor to constitute itself the sole agency of collective bargaining. It is its task and its duty to continue to fight, and no law has taken from it its sole weapon, the strike. What is apparent, however, is that after a year of persistent effort, supported until June by the President, Senator Wagner, and the NRA, the American Federation of Labor could not break down the resistance of either the American people or the American worker to enforced organization, to a class struggle based not upon economic but upon social grounds. If anything, the company union — representing, as I pointed out in my article in the August Atlantic, a mutual association of capital and labor in an industry — is stronger than it was a year ago, because, threatened by legal destruction, it has become legalized. It persists because it is sound, both because of its vertical organization and because of the social relationships of capital and labor in American life.
The struggle in the future will be between the two types of vertical union — the company union and the Communist union. Both represent the same principle — namely, that labor should be organized to speak for an entire industry, in all its parts, and not for merely a single craft in that industry. The acceptance of this principle by the workers would eliminate the American Federation of Labor. Both vertical unions represent the same idea: that labor action should be principally economic and not political; that labor can be strengthened, not by Congressional legislation and administrative support, but only by the workers’ own efforts in wresting rights from capital. The avoidance of politics would weaken the A. F. of L. still further, for it is an organization which exists by political action. Both vertical unions are similar in lumping together the skilled and the unskilled worker, in their opposition to the outside agent, the labor union wire-puller and racketeer.
They differ in this essential: namely, that whereas the company union represents an agency of the capitalist system, the Communist union devotes itself to the class struggle; that whereas the company union supports capital in the profit motive, the Communist union seeks ultimately to confiscate industry in the interest of the proletariat.
This struggle is imminent in the United States, with the A. F. of L. a political spectator, as it really was in the San Francisco general strike, protecting as best it can a very small percentage of American workers. It seems probable that ultimately a revised form of the company union, less dominated than at present by capitalists, will emerge as the victor in this contest.