Significant Decisions

The twelve-man War Labor Board made three significant decisions last week:

> For the second time in as many weeks WLB punished a union for being a bad boy, denied maintenance of membership to the locals in certain Monsanto Chemical Co. plants. Unlike the precedent-setting Aluminum Co. of America case (TIME, Aug. 31), WLB gave specific reason for its action: the union broke a "no-strike" pledge, called a five-day, 700-man strike in July.

> The board stretched its famed 15% Little Steel formula still further, granted a 5 1/2-c--an-hour pay boost, maintenance of membership and checkoff to 250,000 U.S. Steel Corp. workers. But the eight board members representing labor, Government and the public stretched the formula almost to the breaking point when they made the raise retroactive to Feb. 15, ignored a C.I.O.-U.S. Steel fixed-wage contract running through Aug. 9. The four employer members screamed murder, said the majority had destroyed the sanctity of a contract, predicted the decision would "rise to plague" them.

> WLB okayed a wage boost for 400 employes in 13 St. Louis machine shops, then ordered all workers earning over $1 an hour to invest "at least 10%" of their pay in war bonds. This is not as revolutionary as it sounds: both labor and management had agreed to the scheme. But it may set a precedent for "voluntary" forced savings, and it may give unions a lever to pry wages still higher on the ground that the raise would buy war bonds, hence would not be inflationary.

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