Pressure Rising

The House Judiciary Committee last week sat down to see what it could do about labor disputes in defense industries. Before the committee were nine bills, offered by brother Congressmen as cure-alls.

While the committee deliberated, workers in 20 defense plants in the U. S. were out on strike. Most of the strikes were little ones, some even insignificant. Of greater concern to observers than any struck plant was the touch-&-go situation at Lackawanna, N. Y., where the long rumble of C. I. O.'s struggle with Bethlehem Steel was gathering into a roar. C. I. O. steelworkers, asserting that 300 fellow employes had been locked out of a coke plant in a dispute over a wage increase, voted to call a general strike in protest. A walkout at Lackawanna would affect 14,000 men, tie up millions of dollars of defense orders.

Crippled by strikes were three International Harvester plants, paralyzed was Allis-Chalmers in Milwaukee. The Office of Production Management had announced, week before, that the Allis-Chalmers dispute was good as settled. OPM's Knudsenhillman had summoned management and union leaders to Washington and talked gruffly, but no sooner were the disputants out of sight than they were at it again. Was OPM muscle more mush than gristle? It began to look so.

William Knudsen, half of OPM's two-headed boss, was nevertheless undisturbed. Appearing as a witness before the Judiciary Committee, he said: "We thought that we had that one settled . . . but they thought up another one on the way home. . . . If we could get across to labor and industry how vital this program is to our future . . . then I don't think petty disputes would stop this program." Day later his fellow director of OPM, Sidney Hillman, echoed him: "Cooperation is the answer to labor troubles."

But so far as the House Judiciary Committee was concerned, OPM's answer was not the right answer. Said Chairman Hatton Sumners, Nestor of the House: "We here in Congress are under pressure from many sources to act in this situation, because we represent the whole people. If we don't act we may not come back here. . . ."

As Chairman Sumners and his colleagues shouldered their way into a problem which the Administration would rather handle itself, out came some measured advice from The Twentieth Century Fund. The Fund, set up in 1919 by the late Edward Filene, Boston merchant, to survey the fields of sociology and business, had ready a scholarly, well-documented survey on "Labor and National Defense." Author of the report was Dr. Lloyd G. Reynolds, associate in political economy at Johns Hopkins University.

Strikes, said Dr. Reynolds, would probably increase in the near future. Reasons: 1) probability of rising consumer goods prices; 2) bigger industrial profits, in which labor would demand a share; 3) union organizational drives*; 4) rivalry between A. F. of L. and C. I. O.; 5) pressure for increased production.

Said the report: "Under an authoritarian regime disturbances may be minimized, though never entirely prevented, by the constant threat of imprisonment or death." But the experiences of democracies "discredit the naive and widely-held view that the remedy for strikes is simply to prohibit them. In a democratic country the main responsibility for strike prevention must rest with the parties to industry."

* Said the report: "The industries concerned most directly with national defense were almost entirely non-union in 1917. Now they are 30 to 40% unionized, with aggressive organizing campaigns under way or projected in most fields."

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