LABOR: Sunday in the Park

One of the unbarbed items in Pins & Needles, the revue produced by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, is a wistful number called Sunday in the Park, depicting the tribulations of the proletariat when it deserts New York’s teeming streets for its teeming parks. A man who enjoys such simple proletarian pleasures is former Garment-Cutter David Dubinsky, president of I.L.G.W.U. Unlike many labor leaders, he would rather ride on a bicycle than bet on a bicycle race. Palm Sunday, stocky little President Dubinsky, attired in a leather windbreaker, was pedaling through New York’s Central Park on the elegant English bicycle given him last year by his Lingerie Workers local. There Labor Leader Dubinsky chanced to meet his ubiquitous old friend, Labor Reporter Louis Stark of the New York Times, who was spending Sunday in the park on foot. What followed while Sunday dinner waited must have been a busman’s holiday because next day from Washington, on the eve of a meeting of the Committee for Industrial Organization, Sunday stroller Stark reported that I.L.G.W.U. would quit C.I.O. if it decided to call a convention to form a permanent organization.

Promptly, President Dubinsky labeled such reports “absolutely untrue.” But his old friend Louis Stark did not mind and Mr. Stark’s old friends knew better. Ever since Mr. Dubinsky accused John L. Lewis of responsibility for the breakdown of A. F. of L.-C.I.O. peace negotiations last December, relations between I.L.G.W.U. and C.I.O. have been becoming increasingly unfriendly. What many labor leaders resent is the disruption of the hundreds of local labor councils in which A. F. of L. and C.I.O. unionists can work together effectively, but which a complete breach between the two national organizations makes increasingly difficult. Last week former C.I.O. enthusiast Dubinsky stayed away from the C.I.O. meeting, sent instead Julius Hochman, poet, dilettante and hard-boiled manager of the New York Dressmakers’ Joint Board.

When C.I.O. voted, with Mr. Hochman abstaining, to call a constitutional convention this fall to form a permanent organization, President Dubinsky became less categorical: “The decision . . . creates a new situation. Until now, the C.I.O. . . has neither in its structure nor in its ultimate objectives been designed to be a permanent competitive organization in the American trade union field. . . . The question of our participation in such a convention or of joining such a new organization will be taken up and decided upon by our General Executive Board . .. late in May.”

Loss to C.I.O. of I.L.G.W.U., second largest of the original C.I.O. unions, will mean loss of one of the most progressive, most solvent, most ably led industrial unions in the country. Whether the garment workers remain independent or return to a gleeful A. F. of L. remains to be worked out.

The committee which is the Committee for Industrial Organization consists of the heads of the 39 new and old national and international unions affiliated with C.I.O. It is this committee, presided over by John L. Lewis, which met last week in closed sessions.

Main business before C.I.O. dealt with how it was meeting organized labor’s most devastating scourge: Depression. Though no new total membership figures were made public, Chairman Lewis reported an operating balance in the bank of $17,000, a reduction in the C.I.O. full-time organizing staff from 652 to 244—apart from organizers on the payrolls of constituent unions.

“Unemployment has become the most serious problem in our national life today,” Mr. Lewis told the committee. By taking upon itself the duty of presenting to the nation the case of the unemployed, C.I.O. has embraced a responsibility that organized labor in the past has avoided—usually to its loss. The meeting approved the establishment of unemployment committees in all local unions and industrial union councils to represent the jobless before relief and WPA authorities. Unions were urged to keep unemployed on their membership rolls and charters were authorized for unemployed workers normally members of local industrial unions.

What it expects Congress to do, C.I.O. emphatically reiterated: appropriate $3,000,000,000 for the coming fiscal year to provide an average of 3,500,000 “useful” jobs; undertake a “vast” housing program; pass the Wages-&-Hours Bill; extend unemployment compensation.