Out of a Sheriff's Office

The first time that Robert C. Enos, president of Mellon-financed Standard Steel Spring Co., met C.I.O. face to face was in a sheriff's office. The occasion: a bitter, bloody strike in 1936 in the company's Pittsburgh fabricating plant.

Out of the strike Bob Enos made some new friendships. One was with tall, gaunt Clinton S. Golden, onetime railroad fireman, then regional director for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, and the labor leader who has worked most faithfully and intelligently to bring U.S. labor and U.S. management into partnership.

Between them, Messrs. Enos & Golden put Standard's labor relations on a mature basis, upped wages, lowered unit costs, above all worked out the means whereby the company and its men could talk over mutual problems. By 1941 there was only one problem which mattered: how to switch Standard from springs and auto bumpers into some kind of useful and profitable war work?

Steelman Enos and Standard's chairman, Willard F. Rockwell, suggested an unlikely field--armor plate, long considered the restricted province of Bethlehem, Midvale and U.S. Steel. Laborman Golden, who holds no brief for the way most big-time steel companies handle their labor relations, jumped at the idea, explained it to the men. Against the bets of the whole steel industry, Standard began fabricating plate for tanks.

So well did Standard come out that the War Department wanted much more. Promptly Standard, whose capitalization is only around $3,000,000 and whose total gross in 1941 ran to $13,000,000, led in the formation of a pool of other steel fabricators to do the job. Today the pool comprises 28 companies, 31 plants, and turns put 51% of all tank armor plate made in the U.S. Equally important, the pool makes the plate of special steels which use no precious nickel.

Standard's improvisation of techniques, plus its pooling idea, is acknowledged by the War Department as one of the outstanding production jobs done during the war. Biggest shadow over the operation now is the semicompleted armor-plate mill which lumbering Carnegie-Illinois is putting up in the Chicago area. Desperate for equipment, Carnegie is casting envious eyes at machinery now used by the Stand ard pool. Question now before WPB is whether the pool has not made the new Carnegie plant superfluous.

Scrupulously silent on that point, Steel man Enos is sure of another. Says he:

"One reason we were able to jump the gun is that we have sense enough to see that it's good business to talk over production problems with our men. It's good business because, damn it all, it's their business."

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