Company Unions by Robert W Dunn with William Z Foster. Labor Herald Library No. 15. Trade Union Education League, Chicago. 1926.

Contents: ‘Welfare’ (Poem) by Will Herford, Preface, What are Company Union? The Definition, Relation to’ Other ‘Welfare’ Schemes, Backed by the Open Shoppers, Extent of Company Unions Developments 1917 to Date, The Railroad’ Company Unions, What Company Unions are Installed The Chief Aim, The Employers’ Interests Primary, To Offset the Union, Rubber Stamp Committees, A Bit of Oil History, Employers as Labor Leaders, ‘Passing On’ the Wage Cut, Strike-Breaking-Union-Smashing, ‘Promoting Efficiency’, Specimens, Packing House Councils ‘Industrial Democracy’ in the Jungle, General Electric Company, General Atterbury’s Pennsylvania, The Rockefeller Plan, The Steel Workers Fare No Better, Plan for PuIIman Porters, The Mitten Method, A Kodak Company’s Plan, International Harvester Company, Southern Mills and Dr. Frank Crane, Peace at the Pacific, Plans and Spies at Passaic, “Disloyalty” in Steel, Bethlehem and Buffalo, Wheeling Steel Corporation, Samuel Insull’s Views, A Standard Oil Device, Tactics of Company Unions Introducing the Plan, The Yellow Dog Contract, Using the Sub-Committees, “Equal” Representation, Discharging Trade Unionists, Spy Agency Plans, Political Uses and Abuses, No Outsiders Allowed!, ‘No Discrimination’, Vehicles of Economic Propaganda, Organized Labor’s Relationship Labor’s Argument, Capturing the Company Union, The Fight Against Company Unionism by William Z Foster.

The Labor Herald was the monthly publication of the Trade Union Educational League (TUEL), in immensely important link between the IWW of the 1910s and the CIO of the 1930s. It was begun by veteran labor organizer and Communist leader William Z. Foster in 1920 as an attempt to unite militants within various unions while continuing the industrial unionism tradition of the IWW, though it was opposed to “dual unionism” and favored the formation of a Labor Party. Although it would become financially supported by the Communist International and Communist Party of America, it remained autonomous, was a network and not a membership organization, and included many radicals outside the Communist Party. In 1924 Labor Herald was folded into Workers Monthly, an explicitly Party organ and in 1927 ‘Labor Unity’ became the organ of a now CP dominated TUEL. In 1929 and the turn towards Red Unions in the Third Period, TUEL was wound up and replaced by the Trade Union Unity League, a section of the Red International of Labor Unions (Profitern) and continued to publish Labor Unity until 1935. Labor Herald remains an important labor-orientated journal by revolutionaries in US left history and would be referenced by activists, along with TUEL, along after it’s heyday.

Link to PDF of full pamphlet: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/tuel/15-American%20Company%20Unions.pdf