LABOR: Finger by Finger

In the motor industry, July is a critical month. Then the jigs, dies, tools for next year’s models are being completed. As these are finished, the comparatively few, highly skilled men who make them get their seasonal layoff. Until they are finished, work on the new models cannot proceed down the production line. In giant General Motors, the ratio of tool & die makers to the workers who will later produce parts and assemble cars is about 8,000 to 100,000.

To threaten eventual paralysis of the entire G. M. organism this autumn, pugnacious little Walter Reuther, director of the G. M. department of United Automobile Workers, last week called 800 toolmakers in a Fisher Body plant at Detroit out on strike. Next day he called out 2,900 more in four other G. M. plants, next day 2,300 in four more. His technique, new and shrewdly conceived, was not unlike amputating one finger at a time to cripple a hand. It was painful to the corporation; it was stimulating, exciting for the workers: something new in the newspapers every day, and no man knew when his marching orders might come. Moreover, a few men at a time were exerting pressure as menacing as a general walkout would be, while those still at work kept drawing pay.

Walter Reuther warned G. M. many weeks ago what he was going to do. His chief demands were for wage increases of at least 10¢ an hour, double pay on Sundays, and a union label on all tools, dies, jigs, parts.

That last demand irked General Motors most. It was the key to Walter Reuther’s whole subtle strike purpose. What union label would he prefer? The C. I. 0. label, of course. But not all G. M. workers are C. I. 0. unionists by any means. And the split of United Automobile Workers into a C. I. 0. and an A. F. of L. faction occurred after G. M.’s present contract with U. A. W. was negotiated. Walter Reuther, declared the company, was making demands and calling strikes at this critical time simply to clinch the superiority of C. I. 0. over A. F. of L. in the G. M. sector of the motor industry. G. M. insisted that before it would negotiate anew with its workers, they must go on record in an election to show which wing of U. A. W. the company deals with.

Walter Reuther’s superior, President Roland Jay Thomas of U. A. W.C. I. O., accused the corporation of bad faith. Said he: “General Motors knows that we speak for these workers. The strike vote . . . proved that.”* Why then did U. A. W.C. I. 0. object to an election being held? Because it would delay matters until the tool & die men, if they went on working, should finish their jobs and be laid off.

President Thomas’ superiors in C. I. O., Philip Murray and Sidney Hillman, backed him up with an eloquence and alacrity which clearly reflected C. I. O.’s larger interest in the situation. Homer Martin, president of U. A. W.’s A. F. of L. wing, snarled back at them that the strike was an “outlaw” designed to “pit a few hundred skilled workers against more than 100,000 production workers.”

G. M. underscored this view by announcing that any workers who had to be laid off because of Walter Reuther’s strike would be ineligible for the company’s 60%-of-pay layoff loans designed to tide employes over unavoidable periods of idleness. Then, holding its fingers, G. M. sat tight.

*Walter Reuther’s returns showed better than a 90% vote for the strike in all but one of the nine plants polled.