Power Politics

The Administration, pressured by angry labor leaders and threatened with mounting strike calls, is slowly, reluctantly allowing wages to rise.* This was the real meaning of, and the big news behind, the country's fourth coal strike of 1943.

The strike itself was no longer the paramount problem. Ways & means had been found to give the miners a fat raise. The ways & means were a significant illustration of the significant change in Administration labor tactics.

Just six days before the Oct. 31 coal-strike deadline, WLB had brusquely torn up John Lewis' proposed Illinois mine contract (TIME, Oct. 25). In its place, WLB offered a contract so tortured in its reasoning, so filled with economic Greek, that it took WLB's own statisticians 48 hours to decipher it, and put them through Einsteinian mathematics to justify it. Yet WLB's contract came within $2.50 a week of giving John Lewis' miners what they would have got under the Illinois contract: a weekly wage of $55.50 compared to $58--$10 more than the present rate.

WLB could piously claim that it had not violated the Little Steel formula. Technically it had not; but as a yardstick for real wages the formula is now mackerel-dead. WLB achieved its politically determined result by adding four and a half hours' work--at overtime pay--to the miners' week, and by allowing travel-time pay, something which it swore only five months ago it could not do.

The strike deadline produced the usual war of nerves. First day, almost all John Lewis' 530,000 miners stayed home; the freight cars stood empty at the mine shafts, the U.S. began losing 2,000,000 tons of coal production a day. Then John L. postponed his policy-committee meeting another day. But the Administration, sadly outmaneuvered by John L. last spring, had also learned a few tricks. Franklin Roosevelt, moving swiftly, seized all coal mines, handed them over to Fuel Boss Harold Ickes. And under the Smith-Connally-Harness Act, strike leaders can now be jailed.

There were persuasive reasons why John L. could accept WLB's contract from Harold Ickes. One of them: John L. could tell his miners he got them just about what they wanted.

What Washington fears now is a new flood of wage demands from all union quarters.

*Since enactment of the Smith-Connally-Harness Act, NLRB has had 404 notices for strike votes. Out of 69 strike elections, 64 resulted in strike calls, almost all to put pressure on WLB for higher wages.

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