National Affairs: Weigh Anchor

U.S. ocean traffic with the world began to move haltingly this week after a paralysis which had gripped both coasts. The West Coast tie-up was being unknotted. The East Coast strike was over.

Ryan to Lyon. The signal for peace on the East Coast came one morning last week during a midwatch hour in a New York hotel. Cyrus S. Ching, federal mediator and peacemaker, had put the shipowners in one room and the A.F.L. longshoremen in another. For the better part of the night Ching’s aides shuttled from the weary group of operators, presided over by New York Shipping Association Chairman John V. Lyon, to the grim group of 125 labor delegates, presided over by Longshore Boss Joseph P. Ryan. Around 3 a.m., the operators gave in.

The terms included a 13¢ boost to $1.88 an hour (it was $1.25 in 1945), and 19½¢ to $2.82 an hour overtime. The boosts were retroactive to Aug. 21, 1948. The new one-year contract will run to Sept. 30, 1949. Other terms gave longshoremen a better break in their working hours and vacation plan, and guaranteed a welfare fund to be worked out by a joint management-labor committee. The welfare and vacation provisions were what worried shipping men, who said they had taken “an old-fashioned shellacking.”

Ryan’s 45,000 rank & file, who had disregarded a previous agreement which Ryan had made, accepted the terms by an overwhelming vote. Some 250 ships in ports from Maine to Virginia, tied up for 18 days at an estimated loss of $30,000,000 a day in New York City alone, began to move. Longshoremen began loading some $36,000,000 worth of piled-up Marshall Plan cargoes.

Open Faucet. On the West Coast, operators who had sworn they would not do business with the C.I.O.’s Harry (“The Nose”) Bridges, came to an agreement with him in an aura of warmth and amiability. They had their fingers crossed, but all publicly agreed that The Nose was not such a bad joe after all.

The contract they negotiated was for an unprecedented three years. It gave longshoremen a 15¢ boost to $1.82 an hour straight time, $2.73 an hour overtime. It provided better grievance machinery and continued the hiring halls until the courts decided whether they were legal under the Taft-Hartley law. After Congress rewrites the law, the hiring halls will probably be legal anyhow.

It would be some time before the West Coast could untangle the mess created by a work stoppage of three months and get some 265 idle ships moving. There were still a number of problems to clear up, chief of which were wage discussions with Harry Lundeberg’s A.F.L. seamen, who had had no work since no ships sailed. Said Lundeberg: “We have heard that the faucet is open and we mean to get ours.”