National Affairs: Grand Hotel

Servant trouble last week compounded the normal confusions, stinks and noises of the world’s biggest hotel. In the vast Chicago stockyards, a strike of C. I. O. stock handlers left 17,000 cattle and calves, 25,000 hogs, 10,000 sheep without service and the Chicago Livestock Exchange without a place to trade. Commission brokers and clerks fed & watered the stranded guests. The Exchange could do nothing for itself but suspend trading on the market where farmers sell (and brokers buy for packers and butchers) 13.1% of the cattle, 17.5% of the hogs, 5.3% of the calves, 10% of the sheep slaughtered in the U. S. under Federal inspection.

Chief owner of the packing industry’s grand hotel is Boston Financier Frederick Henry Prince, who is board chairman of Union Stockyard & Transit Co. (and of meat-packing Armour & Co.). Mr. Prince’s bawling, squealing, baaing guests might have been unhappy indeed had not Chicago police stood by to protect their white-collar attendants (see cut). Having won an NLRB election among the handlers by 281 to 280, C. I. O.’s union called the strike to speed up contract talk with the stockyard company’s Vice President William J. O’Connor and General Manager Orvis T. Henkle. Negro Henry Johnson, assistant director of C. I. O.’s Packinghouse Workers Organizing Committee, said the union had been in hot water with Messrs. O’Connor and Henkle since last March, what with cops roughing up negotiating committees, thugs beating up officers and shooting up headquarters. Manager Henkle said his company had been in business 65 years and proposed to continue without benefit of the closed shop and checkoff. The union thereupon gave Mr. Prince’s representatives a choice of 1) a general strike in Armour plants, or 2) armistice pending talk about a written contract.