Phil Murray was just back from ten days in Florida, looking fitter than usual. The lines were gone from around his brown eyes and his firm mouth. Behind the big walnut desk in his green-walled office looking out on Washington’s Jackson Place and the White House, he was every inch the boss.
He stared quietly at the men he had called around him: the United Electrical Workers’ big, red-faced Albert Fitzgerald; the Auto Workers’ paunchy R. J. Thomas and lithe Walter Reuther; all the other C.I.O. brass. He told them, bluntly and plainly, who was going to run the C.I.O.’s strike strategy in the coming critical weeks.
General Murray gave his first order: stop this business of trying to tinker with the country’s economic system and get on with the old-fashioned union business of getting higher wages for workers. There was nothing in the current troubles on the labor front that more money in the pay envelope would not cure.
He was talking directly at Walter Reuther: he did not approve of Reuther’s propaganda in the General Motors strike. Scrappy Walter Reuther talked back. Mild R.J. Thomas snapped back at Reuther. And Murray won his point: wages are the union’s business, prices are the OPA’s.
No Back Talk. The U.A.W. men agreed to soft-pedal the economics. Murray extracted pledges that no major strike policy be set without his approval. Nobody talked back about that.
After three hours on Phil Murray’s deep-piled burgundy carpet, the union colonels hurried back to their strikes and plans to strike, which will reach a crisis next week.
The steel strike (800,000 workers) is set for Jan. 14 at 12:01 a.m., the electrical workers’ strike (200,000 workers) for Jan. 15. On Jan. 16, 125,000 members of the young, turbulent, uncertain Packinghouse Workers are ready to walk out (after a rank-&-file forcing of the leadership’s hand).
General Motors strike leaders showed no sign of losing heart: at a workers’ rally they talked of “shock troops,” “panzer divisions,” “the biggest pillbox.” Other strikes were threatened in the nationwide Bell Telephone System, in New York City Western Union offices.
If nothing gave way in the meantime, the U.S. was in for it.
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