Prelude to Battle

It was estimated last week that in little more than two months the deadlocked shipping strike had cost workers, shippers and their far-flung clients some $457,000,000. Biggest and costliest of its kind though it was, as the year turned there was brewing another industrial battle which promised to make the shipping strike look like a brawl in a waterfront saloon. One mighty antagonist was the world's largest automobile manufacturer, General Motors Corp., master of almost half the nation's No. i industry. The other was the Committee for Industrial Organization chairmanned by the boldest Labor leader in U. S. history, John Llewellyn Lewis, whose ambition is to make himself master of a united U. S. industrial working class.

The superficial causes of the conflict were incredibly trivial. At General Motors' Fisher Body plant in Cleveland early in the week the management postponed a meeting with a shop grievance committee from 11 a. m. to 2:30 p. m. A few key metal workers belonging to United Automobile Workers union promptly "sat down" at their jobs, bringing the whole plant, with its 7,000 employes, to a halt. Already idle were 1,500 Fisher Body and Chevrolet assembly workers in Atlanta who had quit ostensibly because several employes were fired for wearing U. A. W. buttons; and 2,400 in Kansas City whose professed grievance was the discharge of a U. A. W. man for jumping back & forth across an assembly line (TIME, Dec. 28). With the Cleveland closing, the great General Motors production line strung across the nation began to topple like a row of dominoes.

Less than 50 key U. A. W. employes "sat down" in Fisher Body Plant No. 2 at Flint, Mich., thereby closing their plant and curtailing operations in the companion Chevrolet plant which depends on it for bodies. Few hours later a sit-down at Flint's Fisher Plant No. i closed it and crippled the Buick assembly plant which it supplies. Out of work in Flint alone were 14,600 General Motors employes; the local U. A. W. organizer called for $100,000 to finance the strike. Followed sit-downs in G. M.'s Guide Lamp Division at Anderson, Ind., its Fisher and Chevrolet plants at Norwood, Ohio. As U. S. factories closed for the long New Year's weekend, nine G. M. plants with 33,000 employes were already idle and the rest of the Corporation's 69 plants and 211,000 employes seemed doomed to follow before another week was out. The prodigious consequences of such a shutdown were foreshadowed as G. M. suspended advertising, while out to hundreds of independent partsmakers and material suppliers went stop orders on steel, rubber, tools, lights, batteries, brakes, upholstery, carburetors, radios, many another part and accessory.

The crisis had come so swiftly that even C. I. O. leaders were left blinking. That the Committee was out to organize the historically unorganized automobile industry had been evident for weeks, as its affiliated United Automobile Workers and Federation of Flat Glass Workers unions harassed the industry's partsmaking flanks (TIME, Nov. 30 et seq.}. Last fortnight Leader Lewis, demanding collective bargaining, thundered an "ultimatum" at General Motors. But, occupied as he was with a national steel organizing campaign, an internecine fight with leaders of the American Federation of Labor and the possibility of having to lead his United Mine Workers in a strike against the nation's soft coal operators, few observers believed that he would also risk a head-on clash with great G. M. Hence there was reason last week to believe U. A. W. assertions that the burgeoning G. M. sit-down strikes were, at least in part, spontaneous outbursts of old grievances against G. M. labor policies.

If Labor leaders were surprised by a spontaneous tide in their affairs, they did not hesitate to take it at the flood. Pressing his advantage, U. A. W.'s President Homer Martin, with John Lewis' full public backing, last week reiterated time & again his prime demand: That General Motors bargain with his union on a nation-wide basis.

G. M.'s Executive Vice President William S. Knudsen shot back a flat refusal, insisting that bargaining must be by individual plants. Furthermore, declared stocky, blunt-spoken Mr. Knudsen: "Sit- downs are strikes. Such strikers are clearly trespassers and violators of the law of the land. We cannot have bona fide collective bargaining with sit-down strikers in illegal possession of plants. Collective bargaining cannot be justified if one party, having seized the plant, holds a gun at the other party's head."

"It is absurd," snorted Leader Lewis in an amazing New Year's Eve broadcast in which he defied virtually the whole of U. S. Big Business, "for such a corporation to pretend that its policies are settled locally. Every one knows that decisions as to wages, hours and other conditions of employment are made at a central point for all the plants controlled by General Motors."

On Mr. Knudsen's third point--that every one of the G. M. strikes had been called against the wishes of a vast majority of the workers affected--the Labor leaders did not comment. Backing for the G. M. executive's assertion came in Flint when all 500 employes of Buick's sheet metal plant sent Buick President Harlow H. Curtice a loyal New Year's greeting, following up a similar Christmas message sent by 1,400 transmission plant workers. But in the automobile industry's complex production mechanism, withdrawal of a few key workmen is just as paralyzing as withdrawal of a few parts from a motor. Overshadowed by the steel campaign, U. A. W. has spent $200,000 on organizing motors in the past six months. Asked last week how manv members he had won. President Martin confidently replied: "Enough to do business with."

At week's end 200 U. A. W. members from some 50 G. M. plants joined their leaders for a crucial conference in Flint. Named was a board of strategy empowered to call strikes in all G. M. plants unless the corporation agreed to bargain nationally on the following demands: abolition of piecework and speedup; 6-hr, day, 30-hr. week, minimum pay and a seniority system; reinstatement of all workers discharged for union activity; recognition of U. A. W. as sole bargaining agency for employes.

While the U. A. W.'s demands were en route to G. M.'s President Alfred P. Sloan Jr., that official was engaged in letting his employes know that G. M. would fight before it recognized U. A. W. Said President Sloan, in a statement posted at every G. M. plant: "General Motors will not recognize any union as a sole bargaining agency for its workers. . . . Work in the General Motors plants will continue to depend on the ability and efficiency of the worker. ... I tell you all this not only in your interest, but in the interest of your family. . . . General Motors will continue to keep its plants going just as long as its workers can safely work, and as long as we are able to obtain the essential materials from other plants. . . ."

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