Milk From Contented Workers

Since his labor-peace dove was discovered to be an old black carrion crow, John L. Lewis has scarcely raised his eyes from the pavement. But under his bushy eyebrows he has been toiling deviously away. Last week he corralled a handful of wandering dairy farmers and solemnly anointed them with membership in his United Mine Workers. He was gathering votes and manpower to recover his ascendancy in the C.I.O.

Kathryn the Great. Many months ago, Lewis seized on the Gas, By-Products, Coke & Chemical Division of his U.M.W., put an old & trusted henchman, Ora Gassaway, in top-sergeant command. Tough, unbeautiful Mr. Gassaway was only a top sergeant. Real boss was Daughter Kathryn, whom Lewis made secretary-treasurer.

Coke & Chemical, known as District 50, took the field in skirmish order, leaping jurisdictional fences, rounding up new members for the Lewis camp. Said Kathryn blandly: "It is amazing how many things can be traced to a coal origin, with coke, chemicals, plastics and utilities as starting points." Workers in any of those materials, the Lewises reasoned, were fair game.

All organizers who demurred at raiding other C.I.O. unions, or field workers whose loyalty to John Lewis was doubtful, were quickly purged. Their work, said Miss Lewis languidly, was "unsatisfactory." Miss Lewis' languid air covers a nimble mind. Formally educated at Bryn Mawr, she learned her footwork from Father John. Established behind a huge desk in a cathedral-like office three floors below his, she makes tough decisions in a soft, clipped voice. One of her first decisions was to drop the phrase "affiliated with the C.I.O." from the masthead of District 50 News.

District 50 had already moved in on powder and munition plants, chemicals, gas works. Miss Lewis moved in deeper, spread into cosmetics, electric utilities. She went after casket workers (embalming fluids are chemicals), boatyard employes (varnish is chemically derived). She cast a soft eye on stump-pullers in Louisiana, drop-forge workers in Michigan. Early in the game she and Father John convinced themselves that the country's 3,000,000 dairy farmers were naturals as Coke & Chemical members. After all, milk contains casein, which is used in cosmetics, plastics, etc.

District 50 claimed that the farmer delegates, who were signed up last week by Miss Lewis, represented 22,000 New York dairymen. Observers thought 5,000-6,000 dues-paying members a likelier number. But every little bit in the Lewis treasury helps.

How To Play Hob. Father John has still another bag in which to stow unorganized workers, and another relative to hold the bag: loyal Brother Denny, whose United Construction Workers union has invaded A.F. of L.'s building trades, has grabbed everybody it could lay its hands on. How many new C.I.O. members are under the Lewis flag is a military secret buried deep in Lewis' files. But there are enough to play hob with C.I.O. harmony, enough to start a dozen bitter labor jurisdictional wars.

Last week C.I.O. President Philip Murray took to the radio to urge labor to "support your country and your unions by seeing that not an hour of production time is lost from any cause until we win the war." Pleaded Murray "Work, work, work; produce, produce, produce."

Said John Lewis, from under his sardonic eyebrows: "Recently I wrote a letter to somebody urging labor peace. If we don't have labor peace now, I can only express surprise."

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