Too Much Medicine?

Congress was mixing one of its cure-all patent medicines last week for a social bellyache, the labor situation. Labor leaders did not like the whiffs they got from the brew. To A.F. of L. President William Green, the legislation smelt like "a violation of the Constitution." C.I.O. President Philip Murray called it an effort to clamp upon "the total American economy a rigid status of enforced labor." The May, Connally and Vinson bills, said labor, jeopardized the right to picket, established compulsory arbitration, deprived labor of its right to strike.

Labor's point got hearty sympathy from an unexpected quarter. At a recent FORTUNE round-table conference, Richard W. Millar, president of Vultee Aircraft, Inc. (whose California plant was strike-shut last fall), said flatly: "I am not proposing any such damn foolishness as to legislate against strikes. I don't think labor should lose any of its gains. I think industry would be the loser if labor did."

From the round table, which included many another hard-headed industrialist and representatives of A.F. of L. and C.I.O., came some ideas which Congress might do well to study. Chief finding: that labor troubles are due to lack of a national labor policy and to the fact that "neither organized labor nor organized industry has an opportunity to participate in forming and executing such a policy." The conference proposed:

1) A National Labor Policies Board representing C.I.O., A.F. of L., the National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber of Commerce of the U.S.;

2) An agreement among employers and union leaders to a step-by-step program for settling strikes, and to a no-strike policy until every means of settlement has been exhausted;

3) A national wage policy; payment of wage increases in defense bonds, to be held in trust (to avoid inflation);

4) Eradication of racketeering and Communist influences by labor unions.

There were signs that this social bellyache was abating, might even go away if Washington did not aggravate it by intemperate medication. Some signs:

P:In San Francisco, Bethlehem Shipbuilding Corp. finally accepted the master contract which all other major West Coast shipbuilding yards had signed. A.F. of L. machinists ended their 47-day strike, went to work for the $1.12-an-hour wage set by the master agreement. C.I.O. machinists voted to follow suit. San Francisco shipyards got into full-time production of $500,000,000 worth of naval building.

P:In Inglewood, Calif., the North American Aviation, Inc. plant was humming. Troops sent in to break a Communist-inspired strike and keep production going had been withdrawn, were camped 1,000 yards away. It had never been necessary to "seize" the plant. Army officers had simply acted as "management agents" for the U.S. Government. Negotiations for increased wages had been resumed under the temporizing auspices of the National Defense Mediation Board, which this week gave the company an additional 24 hours in which to reply to a board proposal for settlement of the dispute.

Optimistically predicting an end to major labor disputes in defense industries, OPM's Sidney Hillman announced campaigns to standardize wages in the aircraft industry. Pattern for the plan was the master agreement among West Coast shipyards, which will be followed on the East Coast, extended to the Gulf and the Great Lakes too.

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