AUTOS: End of an Experiment

The Ford Motor Co. last week ended a three-year-old experiment with a foreman’s union. The experiment, said Ford, had “failed hopelessly.” The company withdrew its recognition of the independent Foreman’s Association of America, whose six-week strike against Ford had hardly put a nick in production. The company stated that it had originally signed an F.A.A. contract—the first in the auto industry—in hopes of making the foremen a more effective part of management. Instead, relations had become so bad that the company now felt that such unions were “unsound in principle.”

Of the 3,800 foremen who had struck, several hundred had already agreed with Ford and had returned to their jobs. F.A.A. had failed to get much sympathy from the C.I.O.-U.A.W., and the Taft-Hartley law will relieve industry of any obligation to bargain with supervisory employees. At week’s end, the foremen still on strike meekly voted to go back to work. They sorrowfully admitted that F.A.A., which had existed chiefly by grace of the Ford contract, was about dead.