LABOR: Strikes & Settlements

¶ In the middle of the feature, Kid Galahad, at the early show at Manhattan’s little Greenwich Theatre “Where Bohemia Meets the Modern” one evening last week, the lights came on suddenly, the picture faded from the screen and the sound equipment boomed: “Attention, please, ladies & gentlemen. This is the motion picture operator speaking to you from the booth. There is no trouble with the equipment and no cause for alarm. I am using this means to protest to you against the inhuman working conditions in this theatre. I work seven days a week, eleven and one-half hours a day, have no vacations, no rest. I eat in the booth where the heat is sometimes unbearable. The management refuses to listen.”

Having locked themselves in their projection booths with food & water for a sitdown, the two operators thus announced their strike by playing on the sound equipment a record prepared in advance, an idea originated by the business agent of Local 306 of the Motion Picture Machine Operators Union (A. F. of L.). Two other operators did the same thing in another Manhattan theatre (run by the same corporation) the same night. Their demands were met by 6 a. m. the following morning.

¶In Detroit a temporary injunction was issued this week restraining the Waiters, Waitresses & Cooks Union from “packing” Brennan, Fitzgerald & Sinks Cafeterias. “Packing” consists of buying coffee, occupying all the chairs in a restaurant.

¶ In an extraordinary display of the brand of labor solidarity preached in another part of the city by Longshoreman Harry Bridges, 3,200 employes of San Francisco’s leading hotels walked out early last May because the managements refused to recognize the Hotel Employes’ Union as collective bargaining agency for 150 clerks and clerical workers. Demands of chambermaids, elevator operators, bellhops and the five culinary unions had been granted. But the hotels balked at the clerks on the ground that they were “confidentialemployes.” For nearly three months such famed hostelries as the Mark Hopkins and the Fairmont on Nob Hill, the St. Francis and the Palace (where died Warren G. Harding) have been closed to transient and local trade.

After the strike was called the hotels declared that previous offers were off. Week after week negotiations blew hot, then cold. Last month one hotel sued the City of San Francisco for damages, alleging insufficient police protection for continuation of operations. Last week on the strike’s 87th day a settlement was finally arranged by which the front office clerks, about 75, were recognized, though on other points the strikers lost ground. Even after the settlement the strikers refused to return to work until the hotels signedcontracts with twelve nonstriking unions such as barbers, electricians, musicians, et al. When this was done the hotels reopened.

¶ Entering its seventh week last week was a strike called by C. I. O’.’s Industrial Union of Marine & Shipbuilding Workers of America in the shipyards of the Port of New York, involving some 15,000 workers. After a shutdown the shipyards began to reopen, bringing almost daily picket line clashes between strikers, workers and police. Cited by the National Labor Relations Board, big Todd Shipyards Corp. had been hailed before a trial examiner, who cried in exasperation last week that the hearings had broken “all records” for perjury. Picketing injunctions had been flagrantly violated. Though severely stoned on several occasions, the New York City police have given ademonstration of strike work which might well be studied by Chicago. One day last week 2,000 strikers & sympathizers sat down on streetcar tracks outside a Brooklyn police station, refused to budge. As soon as one sit-downer was removed, another took his place. Women fought, scratched, screamed. Policemen finally sent the sit-downers scrambling. At week’s end 20 C. I. O. unions pledged $100,000 war chest to carry on against the “miniature Tom Girdlers of the shipbuilding industry.”

¶ Buffalo citizens were offering as much as $1.50 for a pound of butter last week. Storekeepers limited purchases of eggs to a half-dozen. Pork was hard to get at any price. Reason: 1,000 A. F. of L. truck drivers and warehousemen struck for the closed shop, affecting every store in the city except Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. At the same time 1,300 C. I. O. packing house workers struck for recognition, a preferential shop, shorter hours, higher wages. Nearby farmers did a rushing roadside business. By week’s end the truck & warehouse strike had been mediated but the packing strike continued.

¶ Virginia’s Senator Harry F. Byrd announced last week that he would introduce a bill to reimburse a Smithfield ham producer for losses suffered on hams which the Post Office was unable to deliver to Republic Steel Corp. officials during the steel strike.

¶ Branded by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee as “inexcusable” last week was a recent wildcat sit-down of 43 unionists in Allegheny Steel Co.’s Brackenridge. (Pa.) plant. Jealous of its record as a responsible party to labor contracts, S. W. O. C. promptly recommended that the company dock the wildcatters a week’s pay.

¶ Busily tugging the teats of some of her husband’s cows last week was Mrs. Carla de Vries, the woman who kissed Adolf Hitler at the Olympic Games last year (TIME, Aug. 24, 1936, et seq.). George de Vries’ 1,000-cow Vitamin D Dairy in Norwalk near Los Angeles was strike-bound by C. I. O.’s Dairy Workers’ Union. Plodding up & down the picket line led by a striking herdsman was a placid Jersey cow bearing the placard: I WON’T BE MILKED BY A SCAB.