LABOR: Spring Song

Across West Virginia coal fields, through Ohio tire towns, around Michigan automobile factories, over Pennsylvania steel plants and past New England textile mills, the first warmish winds of early spring last week wafted vehement talk of strikes. This chorus of discontent was music to the ears of Labor’s leaders, assembled in Washington. For weeks they had been using, with no great success, all their powers of peaceful persuasion to induce Congressional committees to act upon a stack of labor legislation. By last week they were resorting to threatening strike talk as a means of blasting their pet measures through to enactment.

United Textile Workers’ Vice President Francis J. Gorman had been growling for weeks over the failure of some millowners to live up to the agreements on rehiring strikers and mitigating the “stretch-out” which ended last autumn’s textile strike. When NLRB last week authorized certain mills to reduce machine and man hours by 25%, Leader Gorman cried. ”The stage is set for another strike.”

Prospects of a steel strike amounted to little more than some loud bluster by William J. Spang, leader of Steel’s “rank & file.” But his first job was not to coerce steelmasters but to settle his factional feud with Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers’ old President Michael Tighe.

Let Congress pass the Wagner Bill, barked Francis J. Dillon, American Federation of Labor organizer in Detroit, to the House Labor Committee last week, or the nation’s automobile workers will walk out. The Committee was not impressed. As the results of employes’ elections held by the Automobile Labor Board showed, the A. F. of L.. can command only a minor fraction of automobile workers (TIME, Feb. 25). Realistic Laborites know that at most they can call out some makers of parts, perhaps thus cripple production lines.

Far more alarming to motormen last week than Organizer Dillon’s talk were actual preparations for a strike in Akron, Ohio’s tire & rubber plants of Goodyear, Goodrich and Firestone. Flatly rejected by managers had been demands for abolition of company unions, recognition of A. F. of L.’s United Rubber Workers union. Late in the week the National Labor Relations Board hopefully stepped in, demanded that Firestone cease violating NRA’s Section 73. The Board accused the company of refusing to allow its employes to elect their own representatives for collective bargaining, of favoring and financing its own union. U. R. W. locals at all three tire plants proceeded with plans to settle the strike issue by workers’ polls.

What seemed last week’s worst threat to Recovery was the prospect of an immediate strike of all bituminous coal miners. The hour & wage agreement which President Roosevelt helped negotiate in 1933, was due to expire at midnight, March 31. In Washington, operators’ and miners’ committees had been deadlocked over a new contract since mid-February. Operators stood firm for a one-year extension of the current contract. Miners, in the person of United Mine Workers’ shrewd, hefty President John L. Lewis, wanted hours cut from 35 to 30 per week, wages upped from $5 to $5.50 per day.

In an anxious attempt to soothe Labor and silence its Spring Song of strikes, Chairman Pat Harrison of the Senate Finance Committee flipped into the Senate basket an Administration bill for extending NRA two years, with Section ya intact (see p. 16). Chairman Donald Richberg brought operators and miners before an NLRB committee for an oldtime Hugh Johnson dicker. Two days before the old contract would have expired, the Richberg efforts at conciliation met success. Both sides agreed to extend the current contract until June 16, NRA’s expiration date.

Still free was Leader Lewis to swing his strike club for what he and other A. F. of L. men really want: extension of NRA, passage of the Wagner Labor Relations Bill, the Guffey Coal Bill, the Black 30-hr, week Bill. Anticipating NRA’s demise, bituminous coal operators began some three months ago to slip back into their old price-cutting and overproducing ways, jeopardizing the peace and prosperity which NRA had brought to their industry. Farsighted John L. Lewis then got Pennsylvania’s Senator Joseph Guffey to introduce a bill to make soft coal a public utility. Scheduled to be reported out of committee shortly, the Guffey bill would create a national bituminous coal commission empowered to fix prices and wages, allocate production, buy up $300,000,000 worth of submarginal coal land.

Prime goal of every strike-talking A. F. of L. leader last week was passage of Senator Robert Wagner’s National Labor Relations Bill. Designed to strengthen and clarify Section 7a, it proposes to set up a supreme National Labor Relations Board empowered to enforce the right of any union which can poll a majority of a plant’s workers to represent them all in collective bargaining (TIME, March 4). Under such a system the A. F. of L. would have to organize only 51% of an industry to take over 100% control of its labor. Well aware of this fact were the manufacturers who crowded the Senate and House Labor Committees’ rooms last week to object to the Wagner bill.

Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.’s President Litchfield cried out against proposed policing of all employer-employe relations by Federal agencies. President Henry I. Harriman of Chamber of Commerce of the U. S. called majority rule in collective bargaining “unAmerican and unethical.” Declared James L. Donnelly, vice president of Illinois Manufacturers’ Association: “The obvious purpose of this bill is to force the closed shop upon industry with the aid of Government compulsion. The bill is designed to confer special privileges exclusively on one group. The employer, the unorganized worker, the member of a minority union . . . are given no protection.”