EMPLOYEE REPRESENTATION
industry—when machines replaced hand production. Some managements and
employers resent unions as an invasion of the authority of management. From
such has come support of ‘employee representation” plans or company unions with
the hope of crushing unions by this method, a method which is more insidious than
the old union-smashing tactics. Labor needs to study ways of meeting this
problem to determine whether it can not find more effective methods. If the
representatives of the union control any employee representation plan offered by
employers, it ceases to be a menace.
There can be no doubt that one of the motives inducing some
employers to inaugurate employee representation has been a hope
that it would provide a method for collective dealings with their
employees which would be superior to that afforded by unions. In
some instances, moreover, this purpose was conceived of in negative
terms, simply to “counteract the baneful and destructive effects
both in morale and production of constant agitation from sources
outside the employees themselves, such agitation being almost wholly
of imported ‘union’ inception.”® In a few cases it is conceivable
that certain specific unions may have been the targets at which
employers were aiming, it being anticipated that if employees were
to be granted through works councils substantially all or more than
they were receiving as the result of affiliation with the national union,
they would conclude to drop their memberships. Thustheemployer
would have removed the likelihood of his employees being called out
on strike by a union official for a purpose which he (and possibly they)
would regard as of little local significance.
One is not warranted, however, in concluding that the employee
representation movement is wholly negative in character, intended
simply to annihilate a foe and make the way clear for employers to
dominate their employees’ lives without interference. Many works
councils have been established in plants which unions had made little
or no effort to organize; and the employers’ installation of employee
representation may be regarded as prima facie evidence that they had
come to believe some procedure for collective dealings to be neces-
sary. Instances are not lacking of companies which from the first
regarded employee representation as supplementary to union agree-
8In a letter from the vice-president of a large concern which inaugurated
employee representation during the war.
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