LABOR: Jilted

The A.F.L. and C.I.O., campaigning for members in the South, were so busy belaboring each other that they failed to notice one important fact: the South’s workers did not seem greatly interested in either of them. In three NLRB elections last week at the Army-controlled, civilian-operated Oak Ridge atomic-bomb plants, nearly 40% of the 12,000 eligible workers voted to join no union at all. This was enough to force run-off elections all around.

The C.I.O. got the hardest blow to the mazard. At the big Tennessee Eastman Corporation the C.I.O. was out of the race altogether; there the run-off decision would be between no-union and the second-place A.F.L. At Carbide & Carbon and Monsanto Chemical, C.I.O. got snowed under by the A.F.L., but will have a second chance to fight it out again.

Bravely, the C.I.O. produced its excuses: native Tennesseans (some 70% of Oak Ridge workers) are traditionally tough to corral; James A. Barrett, top organizer of the A.F.L., had won a hefty head start by wartime control of A.F.L. construction workers who had since moved into the plants as operating employes.

But its defeat in the first head-on collision with the A.F.L. seemed symptomatic of its showing elsewhere in the South. Against A.F.L. claims of 100,000 new members and 300 new local charters since May; the high-powered ballyhoo of the C.I.O.’s “Operation Dixie” had won bargaining rights for only 12,000 new recruits. Even if it won all 171 of the NLRB elections it had pending it would add only 37,000 more. Biggest C.I.O. gains were being made among the South’s 639,000 unorganized woodworkers: in Mississippi (including the big Masonite plant at Laurel), in Louisiana and along the Sabine River in East Texas.

For the return match at Oak Ridge, the C.I.O. was still counting on the lure of the 18½¢ pay raise it had already won in rubber, auto and steel. But it had still found no answer to the A.F.L.’s neatest trick: a $100-reward offer for proof that the C.I.O.’s Gas, Coke and Chemical Workers were not Communist-dominated. So far, there were no takers.