LABOR: Silent Silk

Strikes in the nation’s silk mills usually raise a far louder racket than the whirring spindles and clattering shuttles which stop because of them. Feuds between employe and employer have almost always been bitter, sometimes bloody. Ever since last May, when energetic little Sidney Hillman, able, Lithuanian-born chief of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (TIME, April 19), commenced drawing textile workers into C. I. O., signing up man after man in mill after mill, many a bystander wondered what would happen to whom when Mr. Hillman chose to call a strike, 1937 model. Last week, in throwing & weaving mills in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New England, he chose to do so. When 40,000 of the 60,000 U. S. silk & rayon workers obeyed his orders, they got an unexpected answer.

“Of all the branches of the textile industry,” stated Sidney Hillman’s Textile Workers Organizing Committee in a memorandum explaining the strike, “silk is the most chaotic.” That chaos, as most silkmen know, has been the result of an unintegrated industry composed of a few large mills and myriads of minuscule establishments, some of them no more than family shops. The industry’s average silk plant has only 68 workers (compared with 296 in cotton mills, 236 in woolens). Shops open and close overnight. And of late a new jobster has cropped up called the converter—an individual or company, often with one dingy office and no plant, who contracts for raw goods and farms out throwing & weaving to the lowest bidder in cutthroat competition. Nobody has been happy. While owners have found themselves in or near bankruptcy because of bone-slashed prices, millhands have been faced with wages, hours and working conditions as varied & uncertain as the silk in women’s hosiery.

When Sidney Hillman’s strike opened last week, strange things happened. In its first seven days violence was so slight that for color reporters were forced to describe blackened eyes & scratched faces during a picket v. strikebreakers’ brawl at Hazleton, Pa., the pricking of several women with hatpins at nearby Nanticoke. No one was killed, no one was hospitalized. More important than any demonstration was the fact that some employers welcomed the strike as a storm which might settle the dust of disorganization, and others got down to business by forming an association of their own, not to combat Mr. Hillman’s T. W. O. C. but to deal with it in friendly fashion.

Before the strike was five days old the new Silk & Rayon Manufacturers Association, at the start representing some 60 manufacturers employing 10,000 workers and “increasing daily,” sat down in Manhattan’s Hotel Pennsylvania, invited Mr. Hillman to come in for a chat. What went on inside neither Labor’s Hillman nor the Association’s Attorney & Organizer David Cole would say, but the conference was followed by another next day. And from this session, which lasted until 2 a. m., Mr. Hillman emerged with a smile on his face and a contract in his pocket. First step toward stabilization, it agreed to union recognition, $18 weekly minimum for weavers and $15 for other less experienced workers, a 40-hr., 5-day week, time-&-a-half overtime.

Meanwhile in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, Mr. Hillman’s lieutenants were signing similar contracts (about 20) with individual employers not in the Association. By week’s end 8,000 workers had got what Sidney Hillman wanted them to get, 5,000 workers had gone back to work, and the “most peaceful, satisfactory strike” in that shrewd labor leader’s history seemed to be drawing to a finish as smooth as silk.

Also unexpectedly peaceful last week were union activities in Detroit. Recalling the thoroughgoing licking a number of its unionists received at Ford Co.’s River Rouge plant last May when they attempted to distribute leaflets, United Automobile Workers, planning to distribute more literature, last fortnight applied for legal protection from the city of Dearborn, were informed that U. A. W. was a “legal nonentity” (TIME, Aug. 16).* Last week, guarded by State police who were on hand at the request of Michigan’s Governor Murphy, 800 U. A. W. unionists showed up outside the gates of the Ford plant. It was raining. As Ford workers passed they were handed soggy copies of the U. A. Worker headlined: FORD DRIVE GETS UNDER WAY. More rain bucketed down. Unionists scampered for shelter, wet but unharmed.

*U. A. W.’s attorney last week replied to Dearborn’s attorney: “You may recall that there was recently held in the City of Detroit a National Labor Board hearing upon charges against the Ford Co. by the nonentity, the International Union, United Automobile Workers of America. It would appear, therefore, that the nonentity has a legal standing before the U. S. Government. .