The negro has not heretofore had a fair chance in the South for bettering himself. The Tennessee Company has endeavored and is still strenuously endeavoring to give its colored employees an equal opportunity with their white brethren. Although separated, as desired by both whites and colored, the educational facilities it offers the children of the negro workers are identical with those afforded the youthful whites. The community activities are in all respects similar, and in fact, in every way the colored worker at the Tennessee plants and his family have just as much opportunity to live decently and to develop as the white.
At Fairfield, Alabama, the Tennessee Company maintains a hospital, recently erected, which, except in mere size, compares favorably with any institution of its kind in the world. The building, costing over $1,000,000, has accommodation for 334 patients, one half being for white and one half colored. The surgical equipment is the last word in modernity, and the wards and private rooms are splendid examples of good lighting and ventilation and the other factors that go to make a sick room comfortable. The roof of the hospital is a large esplanade where convalescent patients may in fair weather enjoy the southern air and sunlight and a view of miles of beautiful rolling country in every direction.
It is a far jump from Alabama to Minnesota geographically. The educational and general welfare problems that confront the Corporation in the Northwest are essentially different from those it faces in the South. In fact, in the Northwest the Corporation’s subsidiaries have nothing to do directly with education, which is in charge of the local authorities. The steel companies merely meet the bills through paying at least 85 per cent. of the taxes in the sections in which they operate. But their managements take a keen interest in the educational work being done, and though the taxes are heavy and the local authorities seem over-extravagant in their expenditures for education, the steel interests do not grumble. They take the attitude that even if taxation is heavy, it could not be for a better cause.
The small mining towns of northern Minnesota, which, as already stated, depend almost entirely on the Steel Corporation and other steel companies for their revenues, are profligate in regard to education. Their school buildings are imposing. It is not uncommon for a town of 1,000 or so inhabitants to spend three or four hundred thousand dollars for the erection of schools. In one instance at least a splendid garage is attached to the school building, and buses are maintained, giving the children free motor transportation, morning and afternoon, between their homes and the school. And teachers’ salaries are high.
The Corporation’s welfare activities are naturally restricted in this territory, due to the fact that the section is prosperous, and the workers there of a more independent, self-reliant type than those of the South. But the Corporation does all it can in the way of promoting healthful recreation and other similar social work such as club houses, the maintenance of hospitals, etc.
In another chapter of this volume the city of Gary, Indiana, and its scheme of education has been discussed at some length, and therefore it need not be taken up here. The Gary educational plan has been adopted in all essentials at Morgan Park, where the Minnesota Steel Co. has its big plant.
In the older steel sections, such as Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Youngstown, the Corporation’s subsidiaries coöperate as far as they may with the local authorities, in improving educational conditions. In all these sections a somewhat similar plan of welfare is carried out. In some locations, visiting nurses or domestic instructors are maintained at the expense of the company. In others, the Corporation maintains schools for teaching foreign workers the English language and American ideas and ideals. In every part of the country where any of the Corporation’s subsidiaries has a plant no expense is spared to improve living conditions generally and to make up any local deficiencies for education and social betterment.
Housing of workers is another great problem that confronts industry. The Corporation, wherever its subsidiaries operate, has always endeavored to provide its workers with comfortable and sanitary houses at moderate rentals. So far has it gone in this respect that it is seriously open to question whether it has not overshot its mark and created new evils.
In the South, in the Connellsville region of Pennsylvania, where it gets the mass of its coal supplies, in Youngstown, Gary, Morgan Park, and other sections, it has built thousands of houses—the figure given as of January 1, 1920, is 17,553 dwellings and boarding houses—for rental at low rate to employees. The rents on these dwellings are so low that the average rental receipts are only about 1½ per cent. of the actual cost of construction. This is not enough to cover taxes and upkeep, let alone depreciation and a reasonable return on the investment. These low rentals are in effect tantamount to an addition to wages. The adverse side of them, however, is that they discourage private construction enterprise, which cannot hope to compete with the Corporation’s rentals, and also remove all incentive to the worker to own his own home.
For years the subsidiary companies have constructed houses and sold them to employees on an easy-payment plan, but it was only recently that a general comprehensive plan was developed along these lines for all subsidiaries.