• U.S.

National Affairs: Wishing to God

5 minute read
TIME

More men & women were on strike in the U.S. last week than ever before in history. The effects were visible and nationwide.

A TIME correspondent wrote: “Omaha’s biggest business is almost paralyzed. The city sounds different, smells different. One of the oldest, most colorful operations is stalled. Union Stock Yards, usually a hustling, bustling, bawling, bleating center of activity, is almost silent.

“Seven thousand packinghouse workers—breadwinners for 35,000—are on strike. Chimneys that usually belch clouds of smoke emit only a weak little puff now & then. The resounding thud of a sledge on an animal’s forehead is missing. No blood runs on killing floors. The lonesome watchmen make their rounds in silence. To leeward there is no smell.

“Five hundred glum pickets ring the plants of the big-four packing houses. Wrapped in heavy clothing, they huddle around bonfires, crowd into hastily built shacks and drink coffee out of big kettles heated on bonfires. They jump around, swinging their big arms to keep warm. The bar in the union hall locked up its whiskey and beer ‘for the duration,’ sells only coke and tomato juice. If a drunk appears on the picket line he is yanked out, hauled home, cussed out.”

Holiday in the Sun. In Los Angeles, steel and electrical workers picketed or sat under beach umbrellas. For some, it was like a holiday. Theaters and stores in the Huntington Park industrial district did a roaring business. Said one striker: “All during the war I was on the night shift and now I’m going to see every damn wrestling match I can until the strike’s over.”

In Lackawanna, N.Y. near Buffalo, at the sprawling Bethlehem plant, steel strikers had something new to cope with.

Three single-motored planes roared over the heads of the pickets and over the plant’s wire fence, landed safely inside the gates. Out tumbled bags of bread, meat, canned goods and cigarets—provisions for the company stay-ins. Promptly the union hired a patrol plane to find the company’s base of operations. It never did; the supplies kept coming.

In Schenectady, General Electric’s home plant lay idle. There most of the 18,000 strikers were conservative people, somewhat bewildered by what the Communist-tinged leadership of the C.I.O. United Electrical Workers had done. A common complaint echoed through the city: “We didn’t know we were voting for a strike when we voted for a $2 raise.”

Baking at Home. Even the minor strikes looked big to the people closest to them. In Cincinnati the strike that hit home was in the bakeries. Hospitals and school lunchrooms still got bread, but grocery shelves were bare. In some homes, the ancient custom of bread-baking was revived.

In industrial Cleveland, where more than 42,000 men & women were out at the steel, auto and electric plants, the most talked-of strike involved 200 A.F. of L. pressmen on the city’s three newspapers, shut down since Jan. 5. Leaders of the other strikes were glad: they were sure the papers would be blasting them.

There were new picketing techniques. In North Andover, Mass., mounted steelworkers rode horseback in front of the Davis & Furber Machine Co. carrying signs: “Let’s Share Profits.” In Los Angeles, a returned veteran dressed up in a Luftwaffe uniform and German gas mask to picket Consolidated Steel.

TIME’S Cleveland correspondent wrote: “Picketing is de luxe. No walking. Pickets sit in open-front tarpaulin huts, with heat provided by salamanders. Men play cards, gossip, drink coffee. At night some hold potato and wiener roasts. Women pickets gossip and giggle.

“Electrical workers are picketing the home of a Westinghouse powerhouse foreman who is not eligible for union membership. The union wants him to quit work so that there will be no heat in offices and unorganized office workers will have to be laid off. Neighbors of the foreman supply the pickets with coffee.”

Meanwhile the effects of the steel strike were everywhere apparent: 16,000 miners were laid off in coal mines, 5,000 railroad workers in Pittsburgh, 15,000 auto workers at Ford. In New York City, delivery of milk in cardboard containers was reduced by an estimated 35% because the containers are made by American Can Co., which was closed by the strike.

Friendship on the Line. In many struck plants, relations between pickets and management were cordial. When rain and snow fell outside the giant aluminum plants at Alcoa, Tenn., the two pickets at each gate ducked into the warm guardhouses, chatted with the guards and company officials.

After watching some 50 shivering steel pickets march through the slush, Frank L. Driver, president of Harrison, N.J.’s Driver-Harris Co., put benches in his personnel offices, ordered coffee, sandwiches, crullers and pies, sprinkled the slippery sidewalks with sand. Said one apologetic picket: “The strike was orders from higher up. The company knows it’s not our fault.”

In Los Angeles, A. T. Reeve, president of the Kinney Aluminum Co., had a caterer serve breakfast to his pickets.

What did the people think? TIME’S Indianapolis correspondent summed it up. “Most of the people are going around telling each other how they wish to God the strikes were over, regardless of who gets what, so we can get back to normal. The farmers are irate, the strikers determined, and the general public just doesn’t seem to give a damn about the issues. Those who think it’s outrageous aren’t doing anything about it.”

In Washington, the Bureau of Labor

Statistics summed up the cost to the nation: from VE-day to the end of 1945, strikes had cost industry 32,000,000 man hours of production, and workers $257,000,000 in wages. Last week the loss in wages ran at $12,000,000 a day.

No matter what settlements came, these scars of a strike-ridden U.S. would remain.

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