Up to the time of the Corporation’s organization publicity on the part of big industrial enterprises was almost unknown. Certainly steel makers did not show any desire to take the public, or even the small stockholder, into their confidence in regard to details of their business. The immense profits made by the Carnegie company were not revealed until the Carnegie-Frick quarrel caused their revelation. But all this has been changed and the necessity for full reports to stockholders and to the public at large is recognized by the corporations themselves. Steel companies, in particular, give detailed information of their earnings, operations, etc., at least once a year, and in some cases every quarter. And this is doubtless due to the example of the Corporation.
Sooner or later all big business must fall into line in the matter of publicity. For the leaders of business thought are coming to recognize that secrecy breeds suspicion and enmity, while openness makes friends. And they will all follow—as many have already done—the example of the Steel Corporation of doing business in the full glare of daylight.
In the chapter on Welfare Work and in that on the Steel Strike two aspects of the Corporation’s policies regarding its relations with employees are discussed at considerable length. Broadly speaking, the Corporation’s attitude is that every worker is entitled to as large a wage as conditions in the industry and justice to investors warrant, decent living conditions, and the right to work when, where, and for whom he pleases. By encouraging the worker to invest in its stock it seeks to make sure his full coöperation in its activities and to bring home to him the realization that the interests of labor and capital are identical.
Finally, we come to the Corporation’s relations with stockholders, its financial policy. For twenty years the big company has been steadily building up its assets with a view to making its common stock the safest investment of its kind in the world. It is not too much to say that it has now attained that eminence, and if its stockholders in the past have not always shared in profits as liberally as they may have considered their due, there is no question that their loss in the past has been much more than made up for by the security which the future promises.
CHAPTER XIII
STEEL FROM THE INVESTOR’S VIEWPOINT
Although throughout the chapters of this history stress has been constantly laid upon the activities of the United States Steel Corporation in promoting better relations between capital and labor, in improving the working conditions of its employees, in introducing new and more honorable methods into competition, and in blazing the pathway for corporate publicity, it must be recollected that the Corporation has been a business enterprise first and last.
In the final analysis it was and is a money-making institution. The paying of dividends to stockholders was the basic reason for its existence.
United States Steel, both in capitalization and output, was the largest business in the world. But its management was not satisfied with this. It has always been the ambition of Judge Gary and his associates to make its stock the premier industrial security in the United States and, for that matter, in any country.