C. I. O. Faces Defense

(See Cover)

Clouds hung last week like a sign in the sky over steel plants in Buffalo, Gary, Youngstown, South Chicago, Bethlehem. Pittsburgh, the city of steel, was dark, dirtier than ever as smoke belched from chimneys and rolled along the Monongahela. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, ore was fed into blast furnaces, cooked, tapped out in molten iron streams. Open-hearth and Bessemer furnaces converted iron into white-hot steel which was molded into ingots, rolled and tortured into flat slabs, long, thin blooms. In strip mills, finishing plants, hot metal and cold metal was drawn and pressed into tubes, sheets and ropes of steel--the very sinews of war. Sound filled the cavernous mills: thunder of machinery, shriek of steam, roar of Diesel engines hauling flatcars, demon wails of overhead cranes.

In the enormous black caverns, grimy, goggled pygmies crawled through the gloom, eating while they worked, shuffling home after their eight hours to their ugly homes in Duquesne, Clairton, Homestead, on the cliffs of Pittsburgh's South Side. The grimy little men and their doings were far less spectacular than the infernal mills. But if the men quit, so would the white-hot flow of steel.

To the U. S. it had become a matter of great concern that the men and machinery that make steel should keep going. The U. S. watched and kept its fingers crossed against the time it might have to make a fist. Let there be no stoppage of work. By stoppage, the U. S. people meant strikes. Let there be no strikes. If there were strikes for any except good reasons, the U. S. people would hold organized labor to blame.

Preventive measures had already been pondered, including legislation flatly outlawing strikes. But any plan would depend, in the last analysis, on the attitude of labor. So far as defense activity was concerned, the most important attitude in labor was the one taken by a tall, grey-haired citizen of Pittsburgh named Philip Murray.

Head of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, vice president of United Mine Workers, and more important, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Murray is boss of the majority of workers in key industries of defense: automobiles, aircraft, rubber, clothing, electrical supplies, coal--and steel. Defense industry will have to listen to him soon. For every boom, including a defense boom, touches off labor trouble. Such troubles are now being made as surely as airplanes and tanks. Whether they can be settled without weakening the preparations of the U. S. and without impairing the rights of labor depends first on Philip Murray.

Murray has already spoken to auto and aviation through his lieutenant Roland J. Thomas, has spoken to electrical industries through James B. Carey. Last week he got ready to speak to steel. S. W. O. C. has continuing contracts with President Benjamin Fairless of U. S. Steel, and President H. Edgar Lewis of Jones & Laughlin. Either side may reopen negotiations at any time. Murray let it be known that he thought it was time. He also announced that he would send an aide, lanky Clinton Golden, to Manhattan to discuss with President Raoul Desvernine a new contract with Crucible Steel. Labor and industry were approaching the show down stage.

Murray's proposal: a permanent umpire for steel. His demand: a "modification upwards" of wages. In Murray's bag will be other matters to be used for bargaining and trade. Minimum wage rate in the North is 62 1/2-c- an hour. Skilled operators in a rolling mill, paid by the amount of tonnage they roll, make as high as $40 a week. Average rate for the average worker, according to the American Iron & Steel Institute: 84.9-c- an hour.

Nerves became jumpy at week's end and steel sucked in its breath when workers at Carnegie-Illinois's $70,000,000 Irvin plant walked out in a sudden, unauthorized strike for increased wages for men in the slab yard. Irvin, which has defense orders, was shut down for a whole day, until Murray summoned leaders of the upstart strike into conference, squelched them and told them to go back to work.

No Surrender. Confronted with the question of strikes during the emergency, A. F. of L.'s President William Green said: "We commit ourselves to avoid strikes, not only for trivial reasons but for scarcely any cause, unless particular conditions become unbearable." Murray's words were easier to understand: "We are fully cognizant of our responsibilities and are prepared to meet them. But we are not going to surrender willingly to any selfish interest our Constitutional prerogatives and our God-given rights."

Murray speaks with a soft insistence, his words rolling with a Scot's burr. Actually he is an Irishman out of the coal pits. An Irish mother bore him in Bothwell, Scotland. He went to work in a Scottish mine at the age of ten, and when the Murray family emigrated to the U. S., went down into the mines of Pennsylvania. He got his schooling from a correspondence course. At the age of 18, when he protested a weighman's estimate of the coal he had mined, slugged the weighman and got himself fired, fellow miners struck and elected him president of the United Mine Workers' local. Hunger broke the strike, and the new president was put on the train by deputy sheriffs, who told Mr. Murray to get out of town.

In 1912, Murray climbed out of the mines for good, when he was elected a member of U. M. W.'s executive board. In 1936, when C. I. O. made up its mind to organize steel, it chose tough, soft-spoken Phil Murray to do the job.

From the time the "Sons of Vulcan" had formed the first iron union, 78 years before, the story of iron and steel had been picturesque and gory. The silk-hatted, frock-coated Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers had succumbed to technological changes. Carnegie and his Pinkerton rowdies had crushed the union in the murderous fracas at Homestead.

Attempts of A. F. of L. to organize steel were blasted in the bud. Corporations enlisted even the clergy in their war against the unions. Cried the Rev. P. Molyneux of Braddock, Pa. in 1919: "That's the only way you can reason with these people: knock them down." Said Pennsylvania's Governor William Sproul: "I heartily agree with your analysis. . . ."

After 1929, corporations laid off workers, staggered work, cut wages. Desperation walked the steel towns. That was the bloodied, fortified territory which Murray and S. W. O. C. invaded.

Organizing workers overnight, riding herd on the mills, S. W. O. C. by the following year had won its first big triumph. U. S. Steel signed a contract, and the bars were down. Dozens of smaller companies followed. Only die-hards of "Little Steel" (Bethlehem, Youngstown, Republic, National) stood out, still do.

But Murray is determined that Little Steel shall not stand out forever. Says Murray: "Bethlehem was one of the firms which failed to supply armaments in sufficient quantities or with sufficient speed in the last World War." The reasons, according to Murray and according to the 1918 National War Labor Board: "[Bethlehem's] treatment of its employes was so severe . . . that strikes broke out." It took an indignant letter from William Howard Taft and Frank P. Walsh, then joint chairmen of the board, to bring Bethlehem around.

Murray now demands: "Do we want to hear the same story in 1940-41?" Says he: "Total war means total defense. This is possible only with the full cooperation and participation of labor. . . . Labor demands that industry get on with the job by getting on with labor."

Garden Logic. Murray is no wild-eyed rabble-rouser. He is a solemn, quietly dressed man who has his own garden variety of logic. He has put his spade into technological unemployment in steel; with a wry face has turned over many a fact: that, for instance, however effective they have been in lowering price, continuous automatic strip mills are, according to Murray's reckoning, displacing more than 84,700 workers. Says Murray: "I will not be sidetracked ... by engaging in any debate on whether these workers will or will not find other jobs five, ten or twenty years hence. As a famous economist once said, in the long run we are all dead."

Murray points to some 8,500,000 unemployed in 1940 while production was soaring close to a record. In 1941, he estimates, 2,000,000 of these may be absorbed by the defense program. He asks what will happen to the other 6,000,000, and worse, what will happen to all of them with the return to a peacetime economy?

Chief argument of management against raises now is that they will hasten the inflationary spiral of rising prices and costs, leave labor's real wages lower, or no better, than before. But Murray has run his own plough around the field of economics and is convinced that labor could get a bigger share of profits now, and could do so without disturbing present prices and costs. He cries shame over a Social Security report that 10,000,000 workers in private industry earned less than $500 apiece in 1937 (highest wage year between 1929 and 1939).

Murray's own solution to these problems: "Industry Councils." He would have the President appoint councils for each vital industry made up of an equal number of representatives from management and union labor, with one representative of Government to act as chairman. Immediate objectives of these councils: coordination of industries and labor to speed defense. Broader objective: a revision and coordination of the whole out-of-joint U. S. economy. Murray recently took his plan to Franklin Roosevelt (who calls him Phil) and discussed it for an hour and a half. But the President was a "very tired man" that day, and he was "obsessed" with a plan of his own, which turned out later to be the lend-lease plan to aid Britain. Murray has heard nothing further from the President.

Murray has long expounded labor-management cooperation, believing that labor can show management many a trick to slick up its lagging machine. He fathered the Reuther plan for speeding up aircraft manufacture. He himself has made a survey of steel and vows he can show steelmen how to increase their production by 30% without expanding their present facilities. Whatever the practicality of the Reuther plan and the Murray plan, both support Murray's claim that labor, having won a seat at the council table with industry, is not content to behave like a captious outsider, but is willing to share the responsibilities and problems of the economic order.

A conservative man, Murray plants his feet firmly, but only after he is sure which way he wants to face. When Murray was elected C. I. O. president last November, to succeed John L. Lewis, some observers expected him to lop off the heads of C. I. O. Communists. No heads have been lopped yet. One man accused of Communistic leanings is C. I. O. Counsel Lee Pressman. Another is Wyndham Mortimer, organizer for the automobile workers. Murray accepts their denials of Communism. He must have definite proof of an aide's deviation from C. I. O. principles before he will fire him.

Because of that stand, he has been accused of moving under the shadow of John Lewis. Murray denies the charge contemptuously. He was Lewis' man Friday for many years, but after his election he became boss. He declares that he scarcely ever sees Lewis now to talk to, and that Lewis pulls no strings.

Labor Leader at Home. Murray moves between three offices: one in S. W. O. C. headquarters in Pittsburgh; two in Washington, in C. I. O. headquarters and in the U. M. W. building. They are all pin-neat. The last is paneled and pretentious. It contains one small picture, of Franklin D. Roosevelt (signed). There Murray looks most like what he is not: a small town bank president. Among the few books on his desk is The Encyclicals of Pius XI, which sets forth the papal views on trade unionism. Murray himself is a "practical" Catholic.

His home is in Brookline, a district of Pittsburgh. It is a square, plain, seven-room, red brick house which he built 23 years ago, still occupies with his wife and a Negro maid named Orpah. The Murray living room is decorated with oil paintings selected by Mrs. Murray. Her husband's favorite is a seascape. Says Mr. Murray approvingly: "The missus has a very good eye for such things." A onetime star outside-left on soccer teams, Murray's only distraction from labor labors now is at tending prize fights.

When he is home in the evening, he puts on blue leather slippers and relaxes in a gold, high-backed easy chair next to the fireplace. He enjoys O. Henry "better than any fellow who ever wrote--he knew more about human beings." For 21 years Murray has served on Pittsburgh's Board of Public Education, although he has not attended any meetings for the past four or five years.

As a labor leader, steelmen regard him publicly with the suspicion that they reserve for labor leaders. But privately they respect him. Said one steel executive: "He handles his own crowd better than most steel company presidents handle theirs." They know him as a hard bargainer, but they admit that he is square.

Murray is less concerned with what people think about him than with what they think about labor. Says he, with slow anger: "There is no moral justification for the cries against labor. Labor is ... just as loyal to the cause of America and the maintenance of free democratic institutions as any group in the country."

To the question, What is labor going to do about defense?, Murray's answer is: What is industry going to do about labor? Both questions will soon have to be answered. With industry expanding and local labor shortages developing, labor will sit down at the bargaining table with new strength. A good outcome will depend on the reasonableness of all concerned.

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