United States Steel: A Corporation with a Soul

by Arundel Cotter

Which all harks back to the question of self-respect. The American is naturally self-respecting and independent. And his accustomed use of soap and water is no small factor in making him so. And the Corporation’s welfare workers see to it that its employees shall never lack soap and water.

Incidentally, among the many activities of the Welfare Bureau is that of instruction for citizenship. This includes the teaching of the English language to foreign workers, instructing them in American ideas and institutions, and assisting them in obtaining their naturalization papers. Foreign workers’ wives are instructed in American standards of housekeeping and in the proper care of their children, and every effort is made to encourage and assist the foreign-born worker to realize the opportunities that this country offers to all and to enable him to take advantage of them.

As the world grows older and wiser and civilization progresses, old ideas are being discarded one by one, and nowhere is this more noticeable than in the realms of business and industry. Principles of doing business, once held as cardinal, have in many cases later been recognized as immoral, not only from the human, but from the economic standpoint.

The old trading doctrine of caveat emptor, or “let the buyer beware,” is no longer relied on by reputable merchants. They realize that the man who hopes to build up a sound, steady business must take upon his own shoulders the responsibility for what he sells both as a question of honesty and policy. Another principle which may be called “let the worker beware,” one which laid down the law that the industrial worker was supposed to be cognizant of whatever risks were involved in his employment and to assume these risks himself, is gradually being legislated out of existence, compensation laws of recent years taking the burden of the dangers of industrial employment off the shoulders of the worker and placing it where it rightly belongs, on the industry.

But the United States Steel Corporation did not wait for the law-makers to force upon it the assumption of this liability. Cheerfully and voluntarily, it accepted for itself the onus of accidents in its plants before a single state of the Union had passed a Workmen’s Compensation Act.

More, the compensation relief plan for injured workmen, adopted by the Corporation in 1910, has served as a model for a number of states in drawing up liability legislation, and is more liberal in some respects than the plans of most, if not all, states.

Yet though the Steel Corporation, as evidenced by its action in putting its compensation plan in force, heartily approves of the theory of industrial liability legislation, the big company’s management is strenuously opposed to certain forms that state legislation sometimes takes. One of these is state insurance, the objection being that this takes away from the employer all incentive to adopting measures for accident prevention. For compensation, after all, is not a cure but a palliative. It does not strike at the root of the disease; and in the final analysis, the important thing is the prevention of accidents rather than payment for them after their occurrence.

In this respect the up-to-date employer has gone much further than legislators. He has gone to the very heart of the industrial accident question by taking what means he could to eliminate, or at least to minimize, the risks incidental to the industry in which he is engaged. He subscribes to the slogan “safety first,” safety even before profit, for he is beginning to realize that accidents are uneconomic and unprofitable, and that their prevention, even if apparently costly at the beginning, must pay in dollars and cents in the final showing. In other words, the modern employer of labor is becoming convinced that safety methods, or insurance before accident, are as necessary as are measures to prevent fire instead of relying upon fire insurance companies to make good losses from conflagration.

Although individual effort to minimize industrial hazards had been made by some companies before the Steel Corporation existed—notably in the case of some of the very companies merged into the “Steel Trust”—the Corporation may with reason claim the distinction of being the real pioneer of the safety movement. For not only did it organize, systematize, and enormously expand the work of the several companies, but it championed the cause of safety, and trumpeted it to the industrial world.

Through its example, as well as by means of a vigorous campaign carried on by the Safety, Sanitation, and Welfare Bureau, it preached the doctrine of “safety first,” a slogan originated by the Illinois Street Co., to all. The largest employer of labor in the world, by its adoption of such a policy, forced the recognition of this policy upon industry generally, and as a result of the safety campaign inaugurated by the Corporation in 1906, safety-first methods and appliances are generally employed in every steel mill in the United States to-day, and, in fact, by a vast number of plants devoted to other industries, and they have spread and are still spreading to other countries.