Business: Trouble in Akron

Akron—world’s largest rubber manufacturing center and the very core of the U.S. war effort—last week produced at 15% below capacity despite a five-year backlog of munitions orders. Instead of the patriotic hustle & bustle which throbs in most defense-plant towns, Akron was a gigantic time bomb, relentlessly, awesomely ticking. Over the place hung a pall of suspicion, bitterness, hatred. Management and labor wrangled, sparred and fought. Root of the trouble is the six-hour day started by management during the depression, now grimly held by the union as a labor “asset.”

Old Stuff. Trouble in Akron is nothing new. In 1902 the A.F. of L. started organizing, finally bashed its head against a united front of the manufacturers. Then came a long series of organizing drives, unrest, strikes, riots. In 1936 labor won its first big victory when the upstart United Rubber Workers (C.I.O.) forced giant Goodyear Tire & Rubber to rehire 70 discharged workers. The U.R.W. signed members in wholesale lots, now has practically all of Akron’s 60,000 rubber workers. Many of them are husky, fearless men from the hills of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia with a background of poverty, moonshining, revenooers.

Boss of this crowd is tall, swarthy Sherman Harrison Dalrymple who has been in the middle of Akron’s rubber mess ever since 1919, is now the president of the powerful U.R.W. Once a rubber worker himself, Boss Dalrymple knows it is tough, hot, backbreaking work. So he wants his members to work less and earn more.

Dalrymple’s method is the six-hour day and a strict quota system which forces every member to work at the same speed. Thus while every factory pays piece rates, practically all banding department men earn $7.92 a day, all truck tire builders $8.90 a day. The men could earn more by turning out more units. But when one company wanted to boost the daily stint to 169 tire bands per man per day the union squashed it to 143 per day. Reason: a few men might not make the grade and get less money than others.

New Stuff. In effect a city wide slowdown system, this form of economic suicide went on without causing trouble until Pearl Harbor. Then things changed. Akron rubber manufacturers, deluged with $1 billion in orders, were suddenly faced with their biggest job ever (TIME, Feb. 2). So they started hiring thousands of men. In no time at all Akron’s unemployment fell to 6,000 men, of whom fewer than 1,000 had any rubber manufacturing experience at all. To ease the pinch, manufacturers put women to work on barrage balloons, life rafts, similar items; Goodyear and Firestone established training schools for tire builders.

This was not enough. The companies went to Dalrymple, finally persuaded him to put some workers on an eight-hour day. But last week over 75% of Akron’s rubber workers were still on a six-hour day. Even the union admits that per man output has not increased since Pearl Harbor.

Off With the Lid. All this came out in the open last month when big, blunt General Tire & Rubber President William O’Neil roared: “a national disgrace . . . the entire production effort of Akron is geared to the slowest man.” Tiremaker O’Neil added that the six-hour day was really a five-hour day because of lunch and “cleanup” periods. Despite the union’s “no strike” pledge, General has had three wildcat strikes so far this year, Firestone was almost strike-shut on the very day it was preening itself to receive the Army-Navy E award, Goodyear had two strikes within a single month.

Some Akronites are afraid the trouble has only started. Biggest reason: to reach peak production the rubber manufacturers will need 40,000 more men within a year (including 9,000 for Goodyear’s new bomber-part factory and 19,000 for new synthetic rubber plants). Nobody knows how they can be found, hired and trained in time. The obvious way out is an eight-or nine-hour day for all rubber workers. Because he was busy arranging an International Union confab, Six-Hour Dalrymple would not talk last week. But most people knew what he would say about such a proposal.