In 1926, Ernest Richmond Burton “broadly defined” employee representation as “any established arrangement whereby the working force of a business concern is represented by persons recognized by both the management and the employees as spokesmen for the latter in conferences on matters of mutual interest.”² At that point employee representation plans (ERPs), or company unions as their critics called them, had been present in the United States for about two decades. The term “company union” has persisted to this day as a way to describe all non-union employee representation arrangements. It strongly suggests a quality present in many ERPs: management’s...

In 1918, John D. Rockefeller Jr. made his second trip to Colorado since the Great Coalfield War of 1913–1914. On May 30 a chauffeur-driven car carrying him, his wife, Abby, and Mackenzie King arrived at a gathering of approximately 3,000 working people in southern Colorado. This multiethnic and multiracial crowd had assembled for the dedication of a monument to the victims of the Ludlow Massacre, which had occurred at that spot during the infamous strike a little more than four years earlier. A few of the leaders of the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) who had organized the...

When John D. Rockefeller Jr. introduced the employee representation plan (ERP) that would bear his name before an audience of miners in Pueblo, he explained that four parties are involved in every corporation: the stockholders, directors, officers, and employees. He then compared Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) to a table:

This little table [exhibiting a square table with four legs] illustrates my conception of a corporation. . . . First, you see that it would not be complete unless it had all four sides. Each side is necessary: each side has its own part to play. . . .

Then,...

Since the inception of employee representation plans (ERPs) around the beginning of the twentieth century, trade unionists and others sympathetic to workers have denounced ERPs such as the one in use at Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&`I) as “company unions” because of management’s tendency to control the course and result of deliberations. For example, Mother Jones wrote in her autobiography, “I told him [John D. Rockefeller Jr.] that his plan for settling industrial disputes would not work. That it was a sham and a fraud. That behind the representative of the miner was no organization so that the workers were...

Andrew J. Diamond was born in Joliet, Illinois, on June 27, 1877. In 1896 he went to work in the rod mill at Illinois Steel Company, which became part of the giant U.S. Steel Corporation in 1901. Diamond left Illinois Steel to take a series of jobs at small independent mills throughout the Midwest and then began a three-year stint at Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) in 1903. Through working these jobs, he became a member of the Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel and Tin Plate Workers, the only independent union representing workers in the steel industry at the time....

In the late summer and fall of 1919, before Colorado Fuel and Iron (CF&I) became embroiled in a nationwide coal strike, Paul F. Brissenden of the U.S. Department of Labor conducted a series of meetings across southern Colorado among union miners, non-union miners, and local managers. On August 13 the superintendent of the company’s Starkville Mine wrote Elmer Weitzel, the manager of all CF&I mines at the time, about one such meeting there. “They took a standing vote on the Rockefeller Plan and everyone voted against the Plan but three men,” he reported.² On August 15 Weitzel wrote CF&I president...

On September 25, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson delivered the final speech of his nationwide tour in support of the Treaty of Versailles and the Charter of the League of Nations contained therein at Pueblo’s new Civic Auditorium. Among those in the audience were striking steelworkers from the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) who had left their jobs three days before. Among the least-remembered parts of the Treaty of Versailles is a series of clauses relating to international labor rights. Most important among them was the one that created the International Labor Organization, which still exists today. While these clauses...

On the morning of November 21, 1927, five weeks into a strike that had stopped production at most coal mines across Colorado, approximately 500 miners and their wives arrived at the north gate of the Columbine Mine. Permanent replacement workers had kept this mine running during the strike, so deputy sheriffs and state police were there to meet the group. “Who are your leaders?” the head of the state police contingent shouted to the strikers. “We are all leaders!” they responded in unison. After more taunts were exchanged, strike leader Adam Bell asked the police to unlock the gates to...

Throughout the 1920s, John D. Rockefeller Jr. took his family on various vacations in the American West and often stopped in southern Colorado. While visiting Pueblo in 1926, Rockefeller and his sons toured the Minnequa Works twice in the same day—once during the morning and once during the evening so the boys could see the plant in operation both during the day and at night, when the fires in the furnaces were more impressive.² Unlike his earlier trips in 1915 and 1918, few reporters followed Rockefeller on this visit. However, the Industrial Bulletin does mention that he met with...

Increasingly uninterested in his earlier efforts at labor relations reform as the decades passed, John D. Rockefeller Jr. never acknowledged that his experiment in industrial relations at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (CF&I) had gone wrong. The Rockefeller Plan did not bring labor peace to the company, a failure that hurt its financial position at a time when CF&I could ill afford any setbacks. A 1949 letter from a disgruntled former CF&I stockholder, Howard Briggs, explains the inevitable result of labor trouble in two highly competitive, increasingly depressed industries:

I am writing this letter to call to your attention...