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Company sit with me?”

Anyhow, the company was getting very desperate by this time. They wanted to get to making automobiles. Knudsen was trying to make automobiles. I may be wrong about this, but my memory is that Chrysler had made an offside agreement with the union. All of this was making the practical people at General Motors very nervous, because they wanted to get the cars into the market.

At any rate, they began their meetings informally in Detroit between the local heads of the General Motors plants in that area and the union. They didn't meet with the big central office people, but with the local plant heads. These were not negotiation meetings, but just talk-it-over meetings. The company was not willing to talk with anybody but Lewis and Sidney Hillman. I'm a little uncertain of the sequence in here, but Lewis, having to talk with the local plant heads, was mad, because Alfred Sloan himself hadn't come, or Knudsen, or Brown, or any of the bigwigs. They had dared to try to negotiate with John L. Lewis through their third-string people. They wouldn't even call it negotiating. They made it clear they weren't negotiating. At any rate, Lewis wouldn't give the orders to take the men out of the plants. And yet, if there was humiliation on the part of the company attached