LABOR: End of a Strike

When Alexander Smith decided to move his carpet-weaving company out of The Bronx 90 years ago, he picked the hustling little town of Yonkers, in the lower part of New York’s Westchester County, for his new plant. The choice proved a good one. From a small, wooden factory, Smith expanded until he became one of the biggest employers in Yonkers.† Just before World War II employment at the plant rose to a peak of 7,000. In 1948 profits hit a high of almost $7,000,000 and the plant, sprawling over 56 acres, was known as the world’s largest carpet mill.

Along with bigness came trouble. When carpet demand turned down and competition stepped up, the company found it could not operate efficiently in a plant that had grown up haphazardly. The multistoried, scattered buildings could not compete with the compact, straight production lines of other new plants. The company lost $1,907,000 in 1951, $3,556,000 in 1952.

To improve efficiency the company sold off its oldest buildings, spent almost $1,000,000 in 18 months for remodeling and new equipment. But the Yonkers plant, which lost $1,800,000 last year, remained in the red this year. Last month the company offered the C.I.O. Textile Workers Union a new contract which it said would eliminate inequalities in pay and would cut the $170,000 weekly payroll by almost 2%. When the union balked, the company offered to make up the $3,000 difference by a 4¢-an-hour increase across the board so the overall payroll would be the same. But fortnight ago. unwilling to settle for anything but a renewal of the old contract, 2,100 employees went on strike.

Last week the company announced that it will close the plant permanently. It will transfer some carpetmaking to a new, nonunion plant in Greenville, Miss., will continue to run a carpet plant in Philadelphia and two other small mills. The union quickly offered to negotiate on the company’s original terms, but it was too late. About all that there was left to do was to arrange for pensions for those eligible (almost half the workers had put in 25 or more years of service). Terming the closing “one of the worst catastrophes that has ever fallen on us.” Yonkers’ Chamber of Commerce President Joseph J. Harding warned: “Industries must be helped in times of distress. Our other industries are not immune to the same thing if there cannot be management-labor cooperation.”

† Among the early employees was Britain’s John Masefield, now Poet Laureate, who rose from the $1.05-a-day job of tin-opener to that of mistake-finder (he inspected rugs for flaws), and who later wrote a book about his experiences, In the Mill.