National Affairs: In Los Angelas

As the American Federation of Labor’s annual convention (TIME, Oct. 17) went into its second & last week at Los Angeles, there went into effect at Pittsburgh one of the most drastic injunctions ever issued by a U. S. Court against a labor union. Schoonmaker Injunction. United Mine Workers employed by the Pittsburgh Terminal Coal Corp. went on strike last April. Pending peace they did not change their domiciles which were, for the most part, houses owned by the Terminal Coal Co. When they sytruck, the company told them to move out, presumably wanting its houses for occupancy by non-union laborers. The union men would not budge. They paid their rent. They guaranteed to continue to pay their rent. The company thereupon forbade trespassing on its property and kept the milkman, the grocer, even the doctor from visiting its unwelcome tenants without its express permission. Then the company obtained from Judge F. P. Schoonmaker of the U. S. District Court an injunction for the union men’s eviction, on the ground that they were hampering the company’s business, part of which is the interstate shipment of coal. To hamper interstate trade, said the company, is to violate the Sherman and Clayton Acts. Judge Schoonmaker agreed and wrote into the injunction a number of other prohibitions wanted by the company, against the unionists throwing rocks at company officials or dynamiting company land, against trespassing, loitering or even parading near company property. By any such acts, implied Judge Schoonmaker, the United Mine Workers might “hamper interstate trade.” Repeal Move. The A. F. of L. convention heard all about the Schoonmaker injunction from Lee Hall, a United Mine Worker from Columbus, Ohio. Speeches were fiery in denunciation of “government by injunction. ” Vice President Matthew Woll adjured his brethren to bring the issue before the country “dramatically, tragically, if necessary,” and reiterated what Labor has felt ever since the U. S. Supreme Court’s celebrated “Stonecutter Decision,”* that the Sherman Anti-Trust Law and the Clayton Act, once enthusiastically backed by Labor, are weapons that have turned in Labor’s hand to Labor’s own destruction.

Vice President Woll advocated, and President Andrew Furuseth of the International Seamen’s Union strenuously seconded, the repeal of the Sherman and Clayton Acts; the substitution of laws which would prevent industrial monopolies but not hog-tie industrial combinations.

Mexican Scabs. Delegates from Arizona and California railed bitterly against the streams of Mexican immigrants which, not restricted by any U. S. quota law, flood the southwestern labor market and supplant union labor in times of strikes as far north as the Pennsylvania coal fields. Other delegates were less deeply perturbed by the Mexican “menace” and the convention voted only to urge the Mexican Government to restrict its emigration voluntarily.

Carpenters Back. The outstanding accomplishment of the convention, in its leaders’ eyes, was persuading the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners to rejoin, after a six-year absence, the A. F. of L.’s building trades department.

Fascists Flayed. Having denounced Communism, the A. F. of L. bracketed with it Fascism. “Lenin and Mussolini are in the same class!” thundered President William A. Green.

Polities. Let Labor be active in the 1928 presidential election, said President Green; let it side with whichever candidate, regardless of party, offers Labor most.

Finis. President Green and his executive council were all reelected. New Orleans was chosen 1928 convention city.

*Handed down last spring (TIME, April 25), ruling that the Journeymen Stonecuters’ Association had acted in restraint of trade when it refused to handle stone furnished by companies it considered to be unfair to union labor.