Mr. Heathcoat: "No, sir. It is not, except in rare cases. It is misjudgment on the part of the manager, Mr. Middleton, as I said before, who is not a practical car builder. As an instance of a waste of material—There was a set of car sashes, made of mahogany. Care was not taken to see that the mahogany picked out was all of the same color. Instead of picking out those of the set that were alike in color and completing the set with new ones and using the off color ones in another set with wood picked out to match, Middleton had the whole set smashed and charged the men with the cost of the material and refused to pay them for their time when it was not their fault at all."
Mr. Wright: "Referring now to the committee appointed to wait on Mr. Pullman—tell us what you said and what was said to you."
Mr. Heathcoat: "We asked Mr. Wickes and Mr. Pullman to adjust our wages so that we could support our families. We wanted either the wages of June, 1893, or a reduction in rent and some increase in wages. Mr. Pullman said he could not reduce rents as he was making only 3-1/2 or 2-1/2 per cent., I don't know which now, on his investment. He said he could not increase wages because he was losing money on his contract work. But he did not say what was a fact that nine tenths of the work that had been done since the cut began was Pullman and not contract work."
Commissioner Kernan: "What do you mean by Pullman work?"
Mr. Heathcoat: "Work on cars owned and operated by the Pullman Company and not work on cars sold to railroads. One result of this was that the company was getting work from us for $1.90 for which it paid the railroads when they did this work $2.50 and $2.70. Two days after he told us the company was losing money on its contract work, a quarterly dividend of 2 per cent. was declared."
Commissioner Kernan: "That might have been paid from accumulations and not from earnings."
Mr. Heathcoat: "Mr. Pullman did not make any such explanation to us when we spoke to him afterward. If he had, perhaps we would not have felt so badly about it. But it did seem hard that when men were working and not getting enough from the company to buy enough to eat that it should pay out $600,000.00 in dividends."
Commissioner Wright: "Were there those not getting enough to eat?"
Mr. Heathcoat: "I have seen men faint by the side of cars on which they were working because they had not had enough to eat. After the cuts, while working as hard as I could to earn enough to support my family, I have been obliged to sit down in the middle of the forenoon to rest because I had not had enough food to enable me to do such hard work and there were hundreds worse off than I. If rents had been reduced I believe there would have been no strike. We wanted to submit the question of rent and wages to a board of arbitration, we to choose one, the Pullman company one, and the two a third. We would have abided by any decision the arbitrators made."
Commissioner Wright: "Did not Mr. Pullman offer to let you look over the company's books to convince you that what he said was true?"