Sleeping Mediators

Practically the whole National Defense Mediation Board last week suffered from a common disease. Vice Chairman William Hammatt Davis of the Mediation Board was in conference one afternoon with other Board members and the Board's young executive secretary, Ralph Theodore Seward, when Seward's head drooped. His eyes grew heavy behind his thick glasses, and suddenly he was asleep. Nudged awake, he stumbled across the room, fell onto a divan, and slept the rest of the afternoon.

Next day Mr. Davis' secretary, Eliza beth McGahey, was confined to bed.

Feeling low, Osgood Nichols, one of the Board's statisticians, wandered into the Social Security Board Building's emergency room. The nurse took one look at him, gave him a sedative and put him to bed. Frank Porter Graham, University of North Carolina president, interrupted by the telephone in the midst of conference with fellow Member Walter Clark Teagle of Standard Oil, blinked at Mr. Teagle with heavy, black-circled eyes as he hung up the receiver. Mr. Teagle was sound asleep on a sofa.

Board Member Roger Dearborn Lapham, of American-Hawaiian Steamship Co., was the color of parchment; Chair man Clarence Dykstra had just gotten over a ten-day siege of sickness. The disease they were all suffering from was simply fatigue and overwork.

When the Board was created, greatest fear was that Secretary of Labor Perkins, jealous of her prerogatives, would not certify enough labor disputes to the Board to keep it busy. She was criticized for hanging on too long to the Allis-Chalmers fracas, the coal dispute, others. Whether Madam Perkins listened to these criticisms or not, she soon changed her ways, fell into the ways of other mothers. When the children started wrangling in the great industrial backyard, she did what she could with the smaller ones, but told the Board about the big ones and held her ears while Pa whaled them.

Ma came to depend too much on Pa. She asked him, for instance, to settle a strike of 210 workers making mosquito netting at Arcadia Knitting Mills, Inc. in Allentown, Pa. She dumped cases into the Board's lap at the rate of almost one a day, not counting Sundays and holidays. The Board did what it could, working night & day, sitting for twelve to 18 hours at a stretch. Of 34 cases certified, it ended 28, sent one back to Ma Perkins as out of its jurisdiction.

Last week the Board looked around for help. Suggestions from Davis were that the Board be given the power to pick its own cases, that the Government quit giving defense contracts to manufacturers who have no collective bargaining agreements with their employes. Other suggestions: enlarge the Board, or create regional boards and let the overworked Dykstra Board function as a final supreme court in labor squabbles.

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