Bonus March

Henry Wallace, who likes to walk to work from the Wardman Park Hotel, was using a long Government Cadillac last week -- and entering his office by a side driveway of Washington's massive Commerce Building. Reason: there was a picket line at the front door. The National Maritime Union, which put it there, was picketing not Henry Wallace and his Commerce Department but their tenants, Vice Admiral Emory S. Land and his War Shipping Administration.

In a friendly but determined way, other N.M.U. patrols marched outside 24 WSA offices the country over. But Joe Curran, the union's leftist president, insisted that it was not a strike.

Rather, it was part of a public-relations campaign. The Maritime War Emergency Board had cut by two-thirds the war-risk bonuses paid to seamen for Atlantic crossings. And Stabilization Director William H. Davis had rejected N.M.U.'s plea to hold up the bonus cut pending this week's War Labor Board hearing on seamen's wages. The pickets were so much display advertising.

Curran's Case. An ordinary seaman on the Atlantic-plying Liberty ship makes $82.50 a month base pay (for a 56-hour week) plus board & bunk. Until last weekend his war-risk bonus was at least 100% of his base pay. If the ship entered a danger area, he got an area bonus (about $25), and a port-attack bonus (about $10). Take-home pay of all its members, N.M.U. conservatively said, has averaged $50 weekly.

Joe Curran conceded that, as the risks went down, the bonuses would have to go down too. But he and his seamen had no intention of working for a bonus-less scale that began at 34 3/8-c- an hour. So he and N.M.U. last month proposed a new wage scale--starting at WLB's 55-c- floor --to the 39 lines which are the shipping administration's agents on the East and Gulf Coast. The employers said no and both sides turned to WLB.

Plain fact was that Curran and the union did not want to take cutbacks from wartime pay and what goes with it. They hoped that the Labor Board would somehow see it their way. Across the land employers, war-plant workers, fixed-income folk looked on, some holding their breaths. Whatever happened to N.M.U. might happen to a lot of other people one of these days.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.