LABOR: Trouble in Paradise

Wisconsin knows Walter Jodok Kohler as its onetime conservative Republican Governor who was a great and good friend of Herbert Clark Hoover. To the U. S. at large, however, he is THE Kohler of Kohler. maker of washstands, bathtubs, plumbing fixtures. He is also the maker of Kohler, the model industrial village which adjoins his large estate and his plant outside Sheboygan.

The town of Kohler, started before the War, looks much like a Midwestern college town. Mr. Kohler built its dormitory-like American Club to house some 300 bachelor workers. Kohler Improvement Co. built its houses (mostly $5,000 and $7,000 homes) for Kohler workers at cost. Kohler Building & Loan Association took their first mortgages and Kohler Co. itself often took second mortgages. All a Kohler worker had to have was about 10% in cash. A town of handsome little homes. set back behind green hedges and green lawns on winding streets, Kohler has long been the perfect picture of a worker’s paradise.

Last week Kohler was ablaze with gorgeous hollyhocks and its first seriouslabor trouble. Upwards of 1,000 pickets, holding their line with a stout rope,marched up & down before the main entrance of the Kohler plant. Within 200 nonstriking employes were kept prisoner. No one was allowed to enter,no one to leave—except Mr. Kohler of Kohler. He drove up in one of his four Lincolns. strode, white-faced and grim-jawed, to the picket line, boldly lifted the pickets’ rope and went in to a chorus of jeers.

Such was a milestone in a 50-year industrial millennium in the Kohler plant. Although Kohler Co.’s sales began to fall off in 1928, it neither laid off men nor cut wages or hours until 1931. Then it cut hours 10%, later wages. Then, too, its workers began to grumble about working conditions: sandblasting was hazardous to the lungs; work at the kilns was deadly hot; penalties for imperfect work were too heavy. Last August the plant for the first time laid off men. Almost at once a local A. F. of L. union was established in the plant, followed, a month later, by a company union. Fortnight ago the A. F. of L. union demanded: 1) the sole right to represent all workers, 2) an increase of minimum wages from 40¢ to 65¢ an hour, 3) a reduction of working hours from 40 to 30 per week.

To Walter Kohler, the true paternalist in industry, such demands represented the peak of Labor’s ingratitude. On wages and hours he might have compromised but he was ready to risk a bitter labor deadlock rather than recognize the A. F. of L. as the sole representative of his workers. The first crisis came when Kohler Co. ran low on coal, after strikers had blocked three coal cars being switched to the plant. Since the plant furnishes the town with water, Kohler’s whole water supply was threatened. Father John Maguire, Federal Labor Mediator, with difficulty persuaded the strikers to let enough coal pass so that the town could drink, wash, put out fires.

The problem of provisioning the men within the plant was solved by having deliveries made by parcel post. On the sixth day of the strike a new difficulty arose. Three hundred and eighty wives and mothers of the men imprisoned in the plant served notice on Village President Anton Brotz of Kohler that either their husbands and sons must be set free, or they would march straight into the plant to be with their loved ones.