Fortress Holiday

For more than seven months the WLB had put off a decision on an old grievance. Since July, West Coast aircraft workers had been demanding an increase in pay commensurate with shipyard scales. Last week the dispute boiled over in a costly mass demonstration by workers in Seattle's two big Boeing plants. Work on Flying Fortresses stopped for three hours, was slowed down for longer.

Fortress builders left their jobs, surged laughing through Seattle streets, attended a lengthy meeting of Lodge 751, A.F. of L. International Association of Machinists. To the WLB they delivered an ultimatum: unless the board decided their wage case by Sunday night, the local union would hold continuous mass meetings of off-shift workers. They called on labor in other big West Coast plane plants to do likewise.

Next day WLB considered the case, reached no decision. To the union the board replied with an ultimatum of its own: unless workers stayed at their jobs no pay increase would be considered. The U.S. people wondered who was bluffing whom. At the Capitol, Congressmen condemned alike WLB indecision, Boeing worker brashness, threatened to revive anti-strike legislation.

Leader of the workers' holiday was rash, 30-year-old Harold J. Gibson (married, childless, draft classification 26), president of Seattle's Aero Mechanics' District Council. At week's end, A.F. of L. International officers cracked down on Gibson, warned that there must be no further work stoppage. At week's start the crisis passed. Instead of round-the-clock mass meetings, only a dozen officers of the district governing council sat around a table in Seattle's old Labor Temple. Loudspeakers in the Boeing plants broadcast union warnings to workers to stay at their jobs.

New York Times Columnist Arthur Krock quoted a statement by Corporal H. V. La Rochelle and 13 other wounded soldiers in Walter Reed Hospital:

"We who have lain in shell holes watching the skies for bomber and fighter plane help which failed to appear feel pretty bitter about the whole thing. In the Army, acts less treasonable than this are punishable with death before a firing squad."

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