LABOR: Golden Luren

Idle and restless at last week’s end were 55,000 Chrysler employes and upwards of 50,000 more in affected supply plants. It was 30 days since Chrysler Corp. began to answer union slowdowns with shutdowns in Detroit. Wage losses totted up to $4,000,000. The corporation had lost the first cream of 1940’s new business, seemed willing to go on losing while its executives and union spokesmen bickered, belied each other, failed even to agree on what the fighting was about. Union wives badgered their men to get back to work. Union men wished heartily that “The Old Man”—stricken Board Chairman Walter P. Chrysler—was back running his automobile plants.

Into this sorry mess stepped Michigan’s senile, godly, sometimes cunning Governor Luren Dudley Dickinson. To Lansing he summoned Chrysler’s President K. T. Keller and Vice President Herman Weckler, the C. I. O. United Automobile Workers’ President Roland Jay Thomas, Richard Frankensteen, et al. No strong man, 80-year-old Mr. Dickinson tried none of the around-the-clock, tire-’em-out tactics which ex-Governor Frank Murphy used to apply to stubborn negotiators. As though he were teaching his Bible class in the Center Eaton Methodist Church near Charlotte, Mich., Luren Dickinson piped: “. . . If you have faith, and apply the Golden Rule, you can get together.” For two hours his pupils did unto each other as they had been done by for weeks, swapping acrimonies and getting nowhere. The Governor pared his nails, enjoined his guests to have faith, occasionally bent an ear to the whisperings of his omnipresent adviser, “Judge” Emerson R. Boyles. Once Mr. Dickinson burst out at Mr. Keller: “Do you mean you refuse cooperation?” Chrysler’s smooth, ingratiating Attorney Nicholas Kelley referred gently to “our friends across the table,” said: “I can’t believe we won’t settle this controversy.”

By letting in a little outside air on the stale quarrel, Governor Dickinson’s interference had some good effect on both sides. At a later get-together with Federal Conciliator James F. Dewey, C. L O.’s Frankensteen backslapped Chrysler’s Weckler, who beamed right back at Mr. Frankensteen. They had agreed on some minor provisions for a new bargaining contract but had yet to settle their prime differences: 1) whether the management alone should decide how hard & fast union men shall work, and 2) whether union men shall have first call on Chrysler jobs.

.