Defeat Into Victory

The brief and bustling history of the Committee for Industrial Organization records only one important defeat: the repulse of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee last summer by the embattled masters of "Little Steel" led by Labor's most galling nemesis, Tom M. Girdler, president of Republic Steel. If steel labor history repeated itself, this defeat should have settled the labor problems of Mr. Girdler and his friends for a decade or two. But, until recently, labor history never knew an unassuming lawyer named J. Warren Madden and the National Labor Relations Board over which he efficiently presides. Last week, what S. W. O. C. lost on the picket lines it was retrieving through NLRB.

The sole but vital aim of last summer's bloody strike had been to win signed bargaining agreements from Republic, Bethlehem, Youngstown Sheet & Tube and Inland Steel. When strike tactics failed, S. W. O. C. began filing charges with the labor board. Certain that it had a majority of the workers in two Inland Steel plants, S. W. O. C. decided to lodge against this company its most far-reaching complaint: that by refusing to reduce an oral agreement to writing, the company had refused to bargain collectively in violation of the National Labor Relations Act. Last week, Chairman Madden and his two associates agreed with the union.

In defining the issue, however, the board first agreed with the company that it was not compelled to reach an agreement, regardless of the circumstances: "If honest and sincere bargaining efforts fail to produce an understanding on the questions at issue, nothing in the act makes illegal the employer's failure to capitulate to the demands placed upon him." But that was not the question: "It is whether a refusal to embody, in a signed agreement, any understandings that may be reached, constitutes a failure to bargain collectively within the meaning of the act. In essence, the question is whether a willingness to embody understandings in a signed agreement is an integral part of the process of bona fide collective bargaining, or whether the signed agreement is a concession which the employer may legitimately withhold."

What applies to Inland Steel must apply to everybody else including the H. J. Heinz Co. and Mr. Girdler and Republic Steel with whom S. W. O. C. had not even been able to reach an oral agreement. Mr. Girdler's repeated insistence that he would never sign an agreement with the "irresponsible, racketeering" C. I. O. unless forced to, seemed on its way to a final test. But three days after its Inland ruling, the NLRB gave Mr. Girdler something more immediate to worry about. In a bristling 60,000-word decision, the board held the $343,000,000 Republic Steel Corp., third largest in the nation, in flagrant violation of the act. Growing out of the strike last summer in Ohio they included: responsibility for causing the strike, open sponsorship of company unions, discriminatory discharges of union members, espionage, terrorization, incitement of violence, responsibility for "an unprovoked attack" on strikers in Massillon which resulted in three deaths and many injuries, all to strikers, sympathizers or bystanders.

S. W. O. C.'s charges against Republic Steel simply alleged unfair labor practices. The union did not claim to represent a majority of the workers and the board said nothing about a contract. It ordered the corporation to stop interfering with self-organization of its workers, to disestablish its company unions, to offer reinstatement with back pay to all the estimated 5,000 strikers and to discharge other employes hired after the strike if necessary to make room for them, to post notices of compliance in the five plants affected for 60 days.

Mr. Girdler, far from posting notices, described various parts of the decision as "startling" and "astounding," promised to "take full advantage of all rights . . . under the law."

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