LABOR: Sit-Downs Sat On

The Sit-Down Strike, suddenly boomed by the General Motors trouble last December as a new phenomenon in U. S. labor warfare, seemed last week to descend from its peak of the week before (TIME, March 1) almost as rapidly as it had risen. The Sit-Down Strike, as an instrument of Labor policy, was impressively sat upon in many places. It had lost its surprise value as police and employers learned more about combatting it. It was being tried on hard-boiled firms which were not so utterly dependent on public sympathy as General Motors and which could afford to take a sterner course with workers who seized company property.

¶ At Groton, Conn., 107 of 1,900 workmen in the plant of Electric Boat Co., manufacturers of submarines for the U. S. Navy, sat down. They passed one day in pleasant converse, whiled away the evening listening to the music of banjo and guitar. Shortly after midnight the plant superintendent appeared at the door and announced: ”All you fellows are fired!” He was followed by 50 State police who arrested all the strikers under warrants for trespassing. The strikers got up with good humor, took their banjo and guitar and marched through the deserted streets to police court. There at 2 a. m. a sleepy police judge released them without bail for appearance later in town court. Next day the strikers picketed, the plant operated peacefully.

¶ At Santa Monica, Calif. 345 of 5,600 employes of Douglas Aircraft Co. on the third day of a sit-down were indicted for “forcible entry and occupancy” but refused to retreat. Police and sheriff’s deputies, 350 strong, surrounded the plant, brought up machine guns, ominously set up a dressing station for expected casualties with a Red Cross flag prominently displayed. The sit-downers retaliated by arming themselves with wrenches, rolling airplanes to the windows so that their propellers could be used to blow tear gas out of the plant. They distributed drums of paint with which they threatened to fire the building. Undeterred, police called for the fire department and prepared to storm the plant if the sit-downers would not surrender. At that tense moment Dr. Towne Nylander, regional director of the National Labor Relations Board, went in and announced that the Labor Board would hold hearings on charges that Douglas Aircraft had discriminated against union employes and refused to bargain collectively, urged the strikers to give up. Believing that they would be licked in a fight, the 345 sit-downers marched out, were carted off to Los Angeles County jail in police wagons and busses, all but three score of them later released without bail. At Northrop Corp., subsidiary of Douglas, 200 sit-downers then walked out rather than risk indictment.

¶ At North Chicago in two buildings of Fansteel Metallurgical Corp. (contact points) 63 sit-downers who had previously repulsed an assault by 125 deputy sheriffs (TIME, March 1) were suddenly awakened at 5:15 a. m. by abombardment of gas shells and grenades. Looking out they beheld a strange object, a 20-ft. wooden tower erected on the rear end of a truck. From slits in the tower four marksmen with repeating guns were pouring tear and nauseating gas shells into the second and third story windows of the seized plant. The sit-downers put on masks or covered their noses with wet rags, their eyes with castor oil, and hurled machine parts and small containers of acid at the tower. Inventor of the tower was a former professor of English at the University of Illinois, now a Fansteel attorney. Remembering the battle towers used in ancient siege operations he designed it, but with bad scholarship dubbed it “The Wooden Horse.” * After more than an hour’s bombardment from this ingenious device, the sit-downers fled from the plants, were allowed to escape, although warrants had been issued for their arrest.

¶ Smaller sit-down strikes were disrupted by various means. In Philadelphia 60 sit-downers in a clothing factory were ousted by two policemen. In Decatur, Ill., 47 sit-downers in a wallpaper mill walked out when a sheriff threatened to oust them by force. In Los Angeles eleven sit-downers in a bakery quit, after the proprietor, with police aid, had prevented food being delivered to them and confined them for 48 hours to a diet of their own pies (twelve kinds).

¶ In Brooklyn 110 workers in a shoe factory sat down on union orders. Among the strikers were two sons and a daughter of Morris Baidowsky, president of the company. The union, sensible of filial relationships, allowed them to leave the factory and go to the movies. At nightfall a committee of 26 sit-downers was selected to stay the night while others went home. The secretary & treasurer of the company, Herman Baidowsky, another son, came to spend the night, He promised that if they would not break anything they could have light all night, and he would see that they got bedding so no one would catch cold. He also told them that the company’s fire insurance forbade smoking, but if any one wanted a cigaret he could come to the office. Several accepted. Then he produced three decks of cards and they played poker together all night. In the morning they agreed to settle the strike by arbitration.

¶ Another sit-down strike never occurred. In a leather plant at Grand Haven, Mich., 300 workers organized a “stay-in.” They did their work by day, slept in the plant by night. The management of the plant did nothing, for the stay-inners were trying to prevent sit-downers from seizing the plant. Said the leader of the stay-inners: “We have nothing to gain from C. I. O. organization here and we have taken steps to make certain that our jobs will not be jeopardized.”

Governors. Although Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan was acclaimed as a great statesman when he refused to let General Motors’ sit-downers be ousted and finally worked out a strike settlement, several other Governors last week appeared disinclined to follow his example. Perhaps they took note of the fact that Michigan has had a bigger rash of sit-downs than any other State. At one time last week there were no less than 22 sit-downs going on in Detroit alone.

One who declined to follow Governor Murphy was the senior of all U. S. Governors, 74-year-old Wilbur Lucius Cross of Connecticut—onetime dean of Yale’s Graduate School and editor of the Yale Review. Kindly, liberal, scholarly, disarmingly honest, a Democrat and friendly to the New Deal, he has been re-elected three times with the votes of many an admiring Republican as well as Democrat. Last week after State police ousted the Electric Boat sit-downers, a union delegation headed by C. I. Organizer Francis X. McCann called on Governor Cross to protest. Jumping up from his chair and shaking his finger in the faces of his visitors in the manner of a dean trying to impress something on a group of disorderly students, the Governor solemnly declared: “There will be no sit-down strikes in Connecticut while I am Governor.”

Not so emphatic was Governor Henry Horner’s announcement after the ousting of the Fansteel sit-downers in Illinois: “I deem it only fair to all concerned to say that the action taken by the Lake County Sheriff was legal and required by his oath of office.” He added: “Although the strikers’ occupancy of the plant and their defiance of a court order cannot be approved, there is also a question as to the legality of the company’s refusal to deal with representatives of striking employes.”

Governor Robert E. Quinn of Rhode Island, questioned about a strike in a print & dye works at West Warwick, obscured his attitude on sit-downs by promising to “protect both the workers and the employers in their rights,” but added forcefully: “I’ll take care of Rhode Island.”

Burly Governor Harold G. Hoffman of New Jersey last week in a radio broadcast repeated his previous promise:

“To the citizens of New Jersey I promise—and to lawless organizations I give warning—that, if necessary, the entire resources of the State will be called into action to preserve the rights, liberties and property of its citizens. . . . The most valuable of human rights is the right to earn, to own and to enjoy property.”

Human Rights v. Property Rights.

Four days later Homer Martin, President of the United Automobile Workers, invaded New Jersey and made a speech at Newark in answer to Mr. Hoffman. He pointed out that strikes are legal. “What is the difference,” he asked “if a man sits down inside or sits down outside?” The only difference he could find was that sitting down inside is easier and safer for the striker. To the argument that sit-down strikes break property laws, he argued back that the right to a good pay check is a property right just as much as the right to own property. With that argument, he advanced the sit-down debate a long way, for it put him and Governor Hoffman in agreement on one major point: that property rights are in fact one kind of human rights. Following this line of thought, the legal issue of sit-down strikes thus becomes not a conflict between human rights and property rights but a conflict between two assertions of property rights, the new and the old.

But Mr. Martin did not touch on a fundamental social issue. For while it makes little practical difference to an owner whether his plant be shut by an inside or an outside strike—either way he is in effect deprived of the use of his property. Nevertheless, a plant cannot be shut from the outside unless a substantial majority of its employes join the strike. A very small minority of employes can generally shut down a plant by a sitdown. If the sit-down should be made legal, the question would still remain whether society would tolerate having its industries shut down at will by any minority that chooses to use the weapon.

*The Wooden Horse was not used for fighting but as a place of concealment in which Greeks hid until it was drawn into Troy.