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Monday October 18, 1915
From the Chicago Day Book: Amos Pinchot on Rockefeller's Plan for Colorado Miners
John D. Rockefeller has returned home to New York with a plan to establish a benevolent dictatorship over the miners of southern Colorado. While we prefer this form of dictatorship to Rockefeller's former plan of government by gunthugs, we agree with Amos Pinchot that the so-called employe representation plan is a denial of industrial democracy.
ROCKEFELLER'S PLAN CALLED A DENIAL OF
DEMOCRACY BY PINCHOT
BY AMOS PINCHOT
When Mr. Rockefeller, Jr., went to Colorado there was just one question of public importance for him to answer.
This question was not whether the Rockefellers have had a change of heart, or whether young Mr. Rockefeller is a sincere and Christian character. These are matters that chiefly concern the Rockefellers and not the public, though the press has rung the changes on them to the exclusion of all else.
The question the public is interested in is: What is the final stand of the Rockefellers about labor unions? This question is of importance. For recognition of the union is the one irreconcilable issues between capital and labor and the storm center of every great industrial strike.
It is true that Mr. Rockefeller's decision was veiled, to a large extent, by his announcement that he would permit, in fact, encourage labor to have its own local organization (which would be about as helpless in a clash with the Rockefellers as a child's toy boat in a battle with a super-dreadnought). It is true also that the real issue has been obscured in a cloud of amazing press-snobbism through which only the young master is revealed grasping the hand of his grateful, grimy man. But nevertheless, the real issue is there, and Mr. Rockefeller himself meets it with as clear-cut a decision as any one could ask for.
Mr. Rockefeller says his employes may bargain with the company through small local unions which may select their own representatives and confer with those of the company. He says they may do this without fear of punishment or dismissal. But to the union, to the real union, to the strong labor organization with national scope and power, he denies both recognition and existence. Mr. Rockefeller's decision to crush unionism and collective bargaining is not modified in the least degree by his permission to labor to organize locally. No union is a union in anything but name unless it has power to bargain with capital - with combined, highly organized capital such as the Rockefellers represent. And this power to bargain is only conceivably possible when there is a broad, non-local labor union of wide solidarity, through which men who are striking for their rights in one section can get encouragement and support from men still earning wages in another.
As Mr. Rockefeller and every great employer knows, there is an immense and increasing surplus supply of labor in the field of low-skilled industry. As they know, while this surplus exists, labor remains sunk in a position of helplessness that is not far removed from slavery. As they know, as every one knows, the wage-earner's one hope of possessing even a minimum of economic power with which to fight for some semblance of prosperity and freedom lies in the labor union, and when the union goes that goes with it.
Under these circumstances it is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Rockefeller's plan to crush unionism will not receive the support of labor. Under this plan, if the employe has a grievance, or finds that he is not receiving a living wage, he has no appeal, except to the benevolent will of his master. If he rebels against that will or organizes to force a compromise, his employer informs him that he must be good or find work elsewhere. He may also take occasion to inform him that this is a free country and that the wage-earner is not a slave, but a free man-free to live and work on whatever terms his employer decides on; free to quit if he does not like these terms; free to move out with his family; free to join the enormous army of the unemployed, and free to drift about in misery and want until he can find work at any wage that will stave off hunger from his wife and child.
This is the reality, not the theory, of the Rockefeller proposal. It is a denial of democracy, and an insult even to that veneer of Christianity with which our industrial over-lords gloss over the savagery of their economic code.
In addition the plan has not the virtue of sound business basis; for, unless the workers of the United States bow to it, which is unlikely, the result will be a series of strikes that will disorganize industry and keep the country in ferment for years to come. Here is where a heavy responsibility rests on the Rockefellers and the gentlemen who stand on their side of the fence.
And this result will be the more regrettable on account of its needlessness from all points of view. For in the anthracite coal fields, where the union has received recognition (the same union, by the way, that Mr. Rockefeller is fighting in Colorado) there has been an almost complete absence of industrial discord, and, instead, a healthy co-operation between capital and labor during the last decade that has worked out in large advantage to both.
There are few intelligent persons today who do not realize that political machinery alone does not and cannot produce real democracy. Economic power is the only dominant power of the world. Without a fair division of this power between the different classes, democracy is impossible and drops to the level of a mere catch-word for political campaigns.
After all the agitation and education of the last two years; after the strikes with their bloodshed and loss in money and suffering, it is discouraging to find that capital-the great bulk of capital-has learned nothing and is thinking of nothing, except how to reinforce its power. This means that the chief fight for democracy must be made, not against the reactionary politician, who opposes progressive machinery of government, but against the industrial absolutist who dominates society by economic power.
[Photograph added.]
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