Strikes Classified

"There isn't a first-class strike in America. Why do the American people get the jitters when the word 'strike' is mentioned? Is it so terrible that people leave work and refuse to come back until they get something they want?"--Madam Secretary Perkins to newshawks last week in Cleveland. Asked what was the difference between a first-and third-class strike, she offered definitions:

Third-Class Strike--one in which there is headbusting. First-Class Strike--one where the workers are perfectly organized, know exactly what they want and how to go about getting it without busting heads.

Whether or not the American people get jitters from the word "strike," the Automobile Labor Board had good cause to worry over the word. The Board, headed by Dr. Leo Wolman, went to Racine, Wis. to settle a six-week strike of 4,600 men in the Nash Motors and Seaman Body plants. It arranged an agreement on the basis of a 10% wage increase. All seemed settled when, at the last minute, strikers voted down the agreement. Meantime the Board had shuttled back to Detroit where trouble had brewed during its absence. A strike for a general wage increase in the plants of Motor Products Corp. (maker of windshield frames, instrument panels, window reveals et al. for Chrysler, Dodge, De Soto, Plymouth, Hudson, Ford) had put 5,600 men out of work. The Wolman Board proposed a settlement. The strikers promptly rejected it, tore up the proposed peace terms. Short of parts, Hudson Motors shut down, temporarily threw 18,000 men out of work, was able finally to open shop again when its workers (unlike Nash's and Seaman Body's) accepted a 10% wage increase.

In the interim the Mechanics Educational Society (union of automobile tool and die workers) served notice on the entire motor industry that unless its members were granted a 20% wage increase, a 36-hour five-day week, its men would go on strike in six days. Impatiently the American Federation of Labor wired President Roosevelt that Dr. Wolman's Board was wasting time trying to mediate cases of discrimination instead of settling them summarily and proceeding to arrange for collective bargaining committees. Battered from pillar to post, the Board, whose appointment "settled" the strike which threatened three weeks ago to shut down the entire industry, was in a thoroughly uncomfortable position--faced by new strikes which might turn out to be both first-and third-class shindigs according to Madam Perkins' definitions.

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