Business: Mr. Avery Says No

To WLB, “union security”—maintenance of membership, voluntary checkoff, compulsory arbitration is the essential quid pro quo which the unions gave in agreeing not to strike.

To Montgomery Ward’s rugged individualist president, Sewell Lee Avery, “maintenance of membership” (which provides that union members must resign from a union within 15 days, or remain members for the duration of a contract) is just the closed shop in sheep’s clothing; nor does Mr. Avery see why the “deal” between WLB and the unions should necessarily be regarded as the law of the land.

Hence last week Montgomery Ward flatly rejected a WLB order that it include the union security clause in its contract with 6,800 C.I.O. employes on the grounds: 1) that WLB had not been empowered by Congress “to do any of the things it demands of Wards”; 2) that WLB’s “supposed representatives of industry and of the public have . . . abandoned the interests of those whom they were appointed to represent.”

Snapped WLB’s public member Wayne Lyman Morse last fortnight at the hearings before WLB came out with its order: “. .. It would be better for the duration of the war that the country go along without Montgomery Ward than that it try to go along with an economic situation under which the no-strike agreement would be destroyed . . . this board is operating under the war powers of the President . . . it has no course of action in the case of defiance but to meet it with whatever forces of government are necessary to compel compliance.” In other words, WLB, like Sewell Avery, had gone too far to back down.

Next move will be for WLB to tell its troubles to the President, who may pen a “Dear Mr. Avery” letter. Chances were it would work. Though he pooh-poohed the validity of the powers that Franklin Roosevelt delegated to WLB, Mr. Avery also said: “… If the President of the United States . . . directs that Wards accept the Board’s rulings … we will respectfully obey.”