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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