LABOR: Peacetime Battle

In Port Arthur, Tex., pickets strode before a Texas Co. refinery carrying signs: “52 for 40 or Fight. This is a Walkout.” The slogan meant that C.I.O. oil workers wanted 52 hours’ pay for 40 hours’ work. The drive was on for labor’s first postwar objective: wartime wages at peacetime hours.

Strikes like Port Arthur’s hit oil plants in seven states through the South and Midwest. By week’s end 27,000 workers were out. Toledo went on self-imposed gasoline rationing, other communities considered similar steps; millions of gallons of gasoline and fuel oil for the Atlantic seaboard were choked off. At one time last week, 323,000 workers were idle, in strikes and shutdowns.

War Plans. C.I.O.’s United Automobile Workers, which had demanded a 30% wage increase and then authorized locals to take less, temporarily, petitioned NLRB for a strike vote in 96 plants of General Motors Corp. The Board forthwith scheduled the vote for Oct. 24. The strike, certain to be voted by U.A.W.’s membership, would take 325,000 workers off the job in the industry which is the spark plug of postwar prosperity.

In Detroit, where the battle lines were being drawn, the number of idle workers went up to more than 86,000 when a Chrysler Corp. Dodge truck plant shut down, laying off 2,200; 800 others for whom there was work found pickets on duty when they arrived at the plant. The 800 did not work. Neither did 50,000 workers shut out of Ford plants because of a continuing strike—which defied even U.A.W. settlement efforts—at the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Co.

Patrols & Skirmishes. On the nationwide front there were patrol actions and skirmishes:

¶ In Pittsburgh, 2,200 C.I.O. steelworkers went out at the Pressed Steel Car Co., demanding $2 a day more.

¶ In the Pacific Northwest a strike of 60,000 lumberworkers was called by an A.F. of L. union which was demanding a minimum hourly wage of $1.10.

¶ In Newark, a strike by the Retail Clerks International Protective Association, A.F. of L., resulted in the closing of 242 Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co. stores throughout northern New Jersey and Staten Island.

¶ In Lancaster, Pa., broad-shouldered cops shouldered strikers out of the way when the Conestoga Transportation Co. tried to put trolleys back on the streets in an attempt to end a three-week-old walkout.

¶ In Manhattan this week 15,000 elevator operators and service employes struck, tying up midcity skyscrapers, including the 102-story Empire State Building; more stood ready to tie up many another building.

The Unprepared. It had long been plain that labor, freed of its wartime no-strike pledge, had also cut loose from the Little Steel formula, was ready to move swiftly and decisively to keep its wartime wage rate. It was also plain that Washington was completely unprepared to meet the shock.

Not until last week did Harry Truman get around to his promised reorganization of the Government’s labor functions. Then, with the battle well under way, he incorporated the War Labor Board, the U.S. Employment Service and the War Manpower Commission into Secretary Lew Schwellenbach’s reviving Labor Department. In turn, Schwellenbach announced the appointment of handsome, wavy-haired Edgar L. Warren, who had been chairman of the regional labor board in Chicago, to head a revitalized U.S. Conciliation Service. Chief Conciliator Warren dispatched 20 of his 250 conciliators to Detroit to try to thrash things out.

The plan was to make the Conciliation Service the heart of the Labor Department, instead of merely a certifying agency for the War Labor Board, as in the past. The first result: WLB, now hanging in midair, lost its chairman, Dr. George W. Taylor, and another public member. Snapped the New York Times: “The board now exists without real powers or prestige … [its] continued wraithlike existence . . . merely serves to confuse thinking and to clutter up the road . . . [Congress] should end the legal life of the War Labor Board now by an immediate repeal of the Smith-Connally ‘Anti-Strike’ Act.”

The big hope of the Administration, as Lew Schwellenbach tried to pull his Labor Department together, rested on the labor-management conference due to convene in Washington Nov. 5. Politicos devoutly hoped that the big confab might have a formula for peace before the entire automobile industry could be struck. But it looked as though Harry Truman was operating on a split-second timetable. His luck would have to be good to head off a complete shutdown in Detroit.