"You Know Better"

LABOR

" You Know Better"

Silk mill workers in New Jersey, steel workers in West Virginia, coal miners in Indiana and Pennsylvania, cotton pickers in California were still striking, picketing, rioting last week in spite of President Roosevelt's warning week before that "kickers" would be sent to the "corral" (TIME, Oct. 16). To lecture Labor about its unrest, a pair of Dutch Uncles marched over to the ballroom of Washington's Willard Hotel where the American Federation of Labor was concluding its 53rd annual convention. "The crucial point is that the strike is never more than a protest," said New York's ruddy-faced Senator Robert Wagner, who as chairman of the National Labor Board had been trying to settle the nine-week Paterson silk strike. "It has no constructive force. It creates hundreds of new problems but cannot solve a single one." General Hugh Johnson, the NRA's gruff chief, spoke next day over an international radio hookup, took a sharper tone. "From the beginning to the end of this [NRA] process," barked the oldtime cavalryman, "you are given a complete and highly effective protection of your rights. The plain, stark truth is that you cannot tolerate the strike. Public opinion is the essential power in this country. In the end it will break down and destroy every subversive influence. If now--when the whole power of this Government and its people is being given to an effort to provide and maintain to the ultimate the rights of every man who works for pay-- you permit or countenance this economic sabotage, that public confidence will turn against you and ... the turn will be either to the extreme right or the extreme left, and either would result in your destruction, as you know better than I can tell you." Having thus expressed his opinion of what the Federation's President William Green calls "Labor's amazing militancy,'' General Johnson barged into another corner of Labor's china shop. "I believe," said he, "in a vertical organization of labor in each industry on a national scale, with representation of Government in each organization of industry." Delegates from the turbulent building trades could hardly wait to get to their seats before they started tearing into the General and the NRA. Michael Colleran, president of the Plasterers Union, declared that the Recovery Administration had been trying "to break down wages already agreed to between employers and unions." Loud Frank X. Martel of the Typographers swore that he would brook no "Gov-ernmental interference" in union affairs, and as long as the NRA "prostituted itself to the business community, strikes would continue." Day after that, a resolution to appoint a committee to study the possibility of the A. F. of L.'s integrating both craft (horizontal) and industrial (vertical) unions (TIME. Oct. 16) was quietly tabled for study by the executive council without debate. The convention, liveliest in years, also: P: Passed a resolution to boycott German goods because of Adolf Hitler's suppression of trade unionism. "It seems to me as I speak to you," soft-voiced President Green told the convention, "I can hear the voices of those leaders in Germany in their prison cells, and the voices of their wives and children weeping in their homes, appealing to us to do something for them. I do feel strongly. I cannot express my feelings. I am touched so deeply." P: Voted 2-to-1 against a resolution by President John L. Lewis of United Mine Workers to increase the powerful executive council from 11 to 25 so as to get new blood into the Federation's directorate. P: Heard President Green declare again: "We are moving now toward the 10,000,000 mark as the next goal in the creation of a constructive, organized force for the establishment of real order and cooperation in American industry." P: Advocated the fixing by Congress of a 30-hr, work week "in the event that re-employment is not accomplished through the action of NRA." P: For the tenth time elected William Green president. P: Selected San Francisco for the meeting ground next year.

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