LABOR: Threats

Never had the National Labor Relations Board seen such churning unrest.

During September the Board got 307 requests for elections to decide what union the workers should join: the previous high was 193. In the first ten days of October, 200 more elections were asked. It looked as if October would be a banner month for unions. Meanwhile there are strike votes ahead, already authorized. Workers at 96 General Motors plants are sure to vote an emphatic “Yes” to a strike vote next week; Chrysler employes will do the same. The bustling, powerful United Automobile Workers have already petitioned NLRB for a vote at 51 Ford plants on Nov. 7, and no one thought of anything but a big “Yes” vote there, either.

Nearly half a million auto workers will be called out in such strikes, if they are actually called, whether they come singly (as the U.A.W. has threatened) or all at once. About 200,000 others employed in other automotive industries will be thrown out of work if they are called.

The steel workers are thinking of strikes, too, a little more remotely. United States Steel has opened negotiations with C.I.O. President Phil Murray, who wants $2 a day more for his million steel workers. If his demands are refused, Murray, too, may petition the Labor Board to ask members of his union The Question.

While some unions still only talked of walking out, 400,000 workers had already done so. Much of industrial Massachusetts was without transportation because its bus and trolley workers had walked off the job; Governor Maurice J. Tobin seized the bus and trolley lines, in the name of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The West Coast lumber industry was still stalemated by striking A.F. of L. lumbermen. In New York City, workers in pasteurization plants threatened a strike that would leave the city’s 7½ million without milk.

The U.S. public, most of whom are also workers, though they do not belong to a union, asked: what next?