National Affairs: Fighting Machine

More than 600 labormen filed into Denver’s cavernous municipal auditorium one morning last week and settled back for the 1937 convention of the American Federation of Labor. It was A. F. of L.’s 57th, the fourth held in Denver. There in 1894 the late Samuel Gompers received his first and only defeat for the A. F. of L. presidency. There in the same building 1 6 years ago William Green, then the inconspicuous pink-cheeked secretary-treasurer of the United Mine Workers, uprose to nominate John L. Lewis for the A. F. of L. presidency. Mr. Lewis was defeated but three years later he returned the courtesy by boosting Bill Green into the job he could not get himself.

Little time was wasted last week on the ironies of Labor politics in Denver. Keynoting to the delegates and later to the nation in a radio broadcast, President Green swore he would drive the C. I. O. out of existence. “The clock has struck. The hour is here. . . .” he cried. “Our patient, long-suffering, hopeful group of organized workers and their representatives will now change from a position of watchful waiting and earnest appeal to the greatest fighting machine that was ever created within the ranks of Labor.”*

High though the hopes of Mr. Green were, the A. F. of L. in convention sessions was not precisely the picture of a fighting machine. Purple tirades against John L. Lewis seldom roused the stolid, hardheaded delegates to more than perfunctory applause. A stirringdenunciation of the Sit-Down by Mr. Green brought hardly a dozen handclaps.

Labor Society. Even less like a fighting machine was the convention out of session. A joy to Denver’s hotelmen, the unionists ate expensively, drank extensively, took all the best rooms and confined their fun mainly to poker. Mr. Green stayed in an $18-per-day suite in the CosmopolitanHotel, where he was served by a union waiter, had his bed made by a non-union chambermaid. Across the street in the Brown Palace, Michael Carrozzo of the Hod Carriers, Building & Common Laborers’ Union had a $15-per-day suite. Two delegates from the International Union of Operating Engineers shared two bedrooms and a parlor at $30. Some of the labormen who brought their wives & children set up housekeeping apartments rented for the duration.

For diversion the delegates and their ladies attended a WPA play, excursionedto mountains, inspected the Moffat Tunnel. On Sunday many a Denver churchhad an A. F. of L. leader in the pulpit.

Repeal the Wagner Act? Though the A. F. of L. conspicuously omitted Secretary of Labor Perkins from the speakers’ list, the delegates listened with polite hostility to Chairman J. Warren Madden of the National Labor Relations Board, who flatly denied that his rulings had favored C. I. O. It was, he explained, illegal for an employer to coerce employes into joining any union, and that included A. F. of L. unions. Whenever the Labor Board discovered an employer forcing his workers into an A. F. of L. union as the lesser of two evils it was up to the Board to act, “for no Board which can read English and can understand the purpose of this law can ever hold . . . that the employer may choose the union for his employes.”

What A. F. of L. particularly hates & fears is the Board’s power to determine units for collective bargaining—in substance the power to determine whether A. F. of L. craft unionism or C. I. O. industrial unionism shall survive. In the General Steel Casting case, the Board last week ordered an election by crafts, an A. F. of L. victory. In several other cases the Board has ordered plantwide elections, which, in effect, deprive the craft unionists of their right to select their own bargaining representatives. And A. F. of L. would like to see the Wagner Act amended to read like the Railway Labor Act, which provides for bargaining by craft or class of employes.

A. F. of L.’s legal adviser, Milwaukee’s Joseph A. Padway, declared that A. F. of L. was willing to await the outcome of the pending Allis-Chalmers test case to see whether or not the Wagner Act was to be “circumvented, perverted and turned into an instrument of propaganda for the C. I. O. “But if the decision was against craft unionism and unless the law was “speedily” amended, he warned, then there would be only one thing left to do: repeal the law.

Credentials. Fast gaining popularity with the A. F. of L. delegates as the convention entered its second week was a proposed boycott on Japanese-made goods, similar to the four-year-old A. F. of L. .boycott on German imports. President Charles P. Howard of the International Typographical Union even suggested a 30-day jail sentence for purchasers of Japanese products. Mr. Howard, who provided the convention’s only excitement, was out of order in speaking up at all in Denver, for the reason that the convention refused to seat him. So far he has successfully kept one foot in each Labor camp—by being both secretary of C. I. O. and head of a union which is in good A. F. of L. standing. His Typographers are pretty C. I. O.-minded but his C. I. O. connection is purely personal. The charge against Mr. Howard last week was the deadly labor sin of having, as C. I. O. secretary, issued a C. I. O. charter to 100,000 Northwest timberworkers who deserted A. F. of L.’s Carpenters’ Union. Typographer Howard replied: “The president of our union, under our constitution, is the head of the delegation to the A. F. of L. convention. The A. F. of L. has no right to say who shall speak for the I. T. U., as long as we pay our dues and assessments. The Federation seems to make up the rules to fit the occasion.”

Actually the rules were not changed. The credentials committee simply stalled. Efforts to spur the committee to action were futile, though so strenuous at one time that Bill Green broke his gavel pounding for order. Apparently the plan was to stall until Typographer Howard departed for the gathering of C. I. O. leaders this week in Atlantic City, where, as Mr. Howard observed dryly, he usually took a vacation “at this time of year.”

Just as they avoided a showdown on Typographer Howard, the A. F. of L. also dodged the prime question of whether or not to expel the rebel C. I. O. unions— despite the thunderous talk of “crushing John L. Lewis.” The resolutions committee recommended, and the convention voted, not summary expulsion but authority for the A. F. of L.’s executive council to expel when & if they saw fit.

*In Manhattan, sarcastic Mr. Lewis retorted: “Surely the mild-mannered Mr. Green is not going to march 3,000,000 members of the American Federation of Labor against an equal number of the Committee for Industrial Organization! He might be charged with disturbing the peace. Or some member of the ladies’ auxiliary of the Transport Workers might hit him with a powder puff.”