Suspense Continued

The leaders of the American Federation of Labor are no hotheads. Last week at their convention in Tampa they resolved against "Communism, Fascism and Naziism" but refused to express sympathy for Spain's embattled workers. They registered protest against Yale University for ousting a pinko Divinity professor but declined to boycott the publications of William Randolph Hearst. They stamped approval on a scheme for Federal licensing of industry to regulate wages & hours, but brushed aside the question of a Constitutional Amendment to make it possible. They plumped for the 30-hour week but shied away from talk of curbing the Supreme Court's veto power. They demanded Labor representation on all Federal, State and city administrative boards but rejected proposals for a Labor third party. And by 21,679-to-2,043 (each international union casting one vote for every 100 members) they decided to do nothing about the gravest crisis in Labor's history--the industrial v. craft union split signalized by the insurgency of John Llewellyn Lewis and his Committee for Industrial Organization.

Leader Lewis' United Mine Workers and the nine other industrial unions then composing C. I. O. were suspended from A. F. of L. by its Executive Council last summer (TIME, Aug. 17). Since then the future course of the U. S. labor movement has hung in a suspense which was expected to be resolved at Tampa. Instead the convention delegates voted to: 1) affirm the Executive Council's suspension order; 2) direct the Executive Council to continue efforts at reconciliation; 3) empower the Executive Council to summon a special convention of the Federation if they should finally feel driven to adopt some "drastic procedure." This temporizing simply meant that the old leaders of Labor, adepts at dodging responsibility, were putting the next move up to John Lewis, shouldering off on him the blame if Labor should be split. A committee headed by the Railway Clerks' George M. Harrison set to work drafting peace proposals, but there was no public indication that burly Leader Lewis was any more ready than before to discuss compromise of his demand for A. F. of L.'s complete surrender on the issue of industrial unionism. Last week the C. I. O. Union News, making a metaphor from the latest method of industrial protest, described the A. F. of L. convention as a "sitdown against Labor."

That the convention, by endorsing the Executive Council's suspension of the C. I. O. unions, had made reconciliation even more remote was asserted by the Typographers' President Charles P. Howard, secretary of C. I. O. The A. F. of L., constitution reserves the power to suspend a member union by a two-thirds convention vote. The Executive Council thus acted extra-constitutionally when it suspended the insurgents, who were thereby deprived of right to cast the one-third plus of convention votes which they control.

Councilman Matthew Woll last week defended this strong-arm action as an "emergency" move based on a "doctrine of assumed and implied considerations," after which effort the dapper, reactionary A. F. of L. vice president collapsed from exhaustion, was hospitalized.

Cried Typographer Howard, whose big union backs C. I. O. but has not joined it, hence was not suspended from A. F. of L.: "By that action the Executive Council first, and later the convention, adopted a policy that changes the entire course of the labor movement from one of an affiliation of equals to one where power is centralized at the top. Fifty years ago the Typographical Union fought against adoption of such a policy at the meetings that formed the A. F. of L. The policy was not adopted. With that new policy now in effect, I shall go out to our members, explain the departure in the light of its full meaning, and then do all in mv power to urge leaving the American Federation of Labor."

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