National Affairs: Navy Moves In

The Navy took over the strike-shut Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. at Kearny, N.J. this week—as the Army took over the strike-shut North American Aviation plant on the West Coast in June. But there were two big differences. This time it was labor that cheered while management just abdicated. And this time it looked as though the Government might have to run the plant for the duration.

No question of wages or hours was involved in the Kearny strike. Both sides had accepted the master agreement which established pay scales and working conditions, exacted from labor the promise not to strike. The one question at issue was “union security.”

In signing away their right to strike union chiefs argued that they were surrendering the only weapon they had. How could they be sure that management would not try to undercut their membership during the two years of the contract? How could they be sure that A.F. of L., strong among shipworkers on the West Coast, would not begin sniping at C.I.O. in Kearny? They demanded a union shop.

The National Defense Mediation Board stepped into the dispute and recommended “maintenance of membership” as a compromise. This would require present and future voluntary members of the union to keep in good union standing as a condition of employment; the company would deduct union dues from wages; but no one not in the union had to join. Twice the union rejected the plan, finally accepted it.

But the company stood firm, declaring it could never make union membership or nonmembership a condition of employment. The union struck. Work on $450,000,000 worth of cruisers, destroyers, tankers, freighters ceased. Federal’s schedule, which had been way ahead, dropped drearily back day after day. To avoid further delay the company offered the yard to the Government to run as it liked. The President, well aware of Federal’s splendid production record, hesitated. Conferences got nowhere. And after 16 days of idleness in the East Coast’s fourth largest private shipyard, Mr. Roosevelt told the Navy to take over.

Workers, confident they would get from the Navy what management had refused them, jubilantly went back to work. Fiscal arrangements, operating methods remained to be figured out, but the management reassuringly offered its knowledge and experience, turned real estate, buildings, ships and unperformed contracts, lock, stock & barrel, over to Navy’s Knox; just compensation could be figured out later.

In full-page newspaper advertisements the company declared: “There must be no recriminations, and no ill will.”