Showdown Postponed

Six and a half million subway riders in New York City last week faced the imminent threat of a strike in the underground transportation systems. City Government and labor leaders, howling bad cess at one another, had quarrelel themselves into a deadlock. The point at issue was fundamental to Government and union labor: have State or municipal employes a right to strike? The same question, in different terms, had been debated before--notably in Boston, Mass., when in 1919 Governor Calvin Coolidge called out the State Guard to break a policemen's strike. In New York City the situation was more complicated.

When the city bought the subway lines, a year ago, it inherited union-shop contracts which C.I.O.'s Transport Workers Union had made with their old private employers. Mayor LaGuardia hedged, declared that some of the provisions (union shop, seniority) were not admissible now that workers were under Civil Service. He accepted the contracts conditionally, decided not to force an issue until the contracts expired on June 30.

But the Mayor flatly refused to renew the contracts. He contended: 1) that the city could not legally sign a contract that permitted collective bargaining;* 2) that, although the city would continue to confer with union leaders (or anyone else), it most decidedly would not require workers to join the union and pay union dues; 3) that municipal workers had absolutely no right to strike. Liberal though the little Mayor is, to give a union the power to deprive the people of his city of essential services was more than he could stomach.

But a subway strike was perfectly digestible to Michael Quill, brass-mouthed boss of T.W.U. He promised a strike on July 1. And radical Mike Quill was backed by conservative C.I.O. leaders because they could see that, with Government spreading its jurisdiction over industry, trade unionism might eventually have to fight Civil Service for its life.

In this surcharged atmosphere, Labor Secretary Perkins met with union leaders in Washington. The air began to clear when a formula for a truce was worked out, to which all sides quickly and thankfully agreed. The truce postponed the whole showdown: T.W.U.'s collective-bargaining contract provisions were extended until the courts decided whether the city could sign such contracts.

Indications were that the question would be carried all the way up to the highest courts, a matter of many months.

T.W.U. promised not to strike meanwhile, postponed its insistence on a union shop.

While New York's subway riders sighed with relief, the big question went undecided.

* In the middle of the wrangle, the city recognized an A.F. of L. union as bargaining agent for 10,000 sanitation employes.

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