What Can We Do?

The Congress, pondering what to do about the strike problem, got all kinds of advice last week.

Dr. William M. Leiserson, Mediation Board veteran, now a Johns Hopkins professor, recommended a permanent national mediation board to sit with management and labor before future disputes reached the strike stage. ("But make no mistake--no legislation will be a cureall. . . . Leave this current crisis alone and it will solve itself--and soon.") Senator Harry F. Byrd advised his colleagues to pass a law forcing unions to incorporate, register with SEC, report their finances and election procedures, assume responsibility for any breach of contract.

The most pungent words came from tousled William H. Davis, who was first chairman of the old War Labor Board. Said he: ". . . Settlement of labor disputes by Government fiat is destructive of all the creative values of collective bargaining. ... I cannot impress [on you] too earnestly . . . the absolute necessity to realize that we must now return to self-government. This is far more important than any immediate crisis that seems to confront us."

Would President Truman's fact-finding program work? No, said Will Davis --any law was bad which might encourage either industry or labor to expect more from Government intervention than from its own efforts. "The last thing in the world to do is to legislate in the light ... or the heat of the present situation. . . .

"I would not have done anything about the General Motors strike. I would have said, 'Go ahead and have your strike.' . . . They will learn something about it. That is what strikes are for."

The most hopeful suggestion came from Connecticut's Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, who said it was high time to establish "a new principle of relationship between labor and capital" based on a "fair and equitable distribution of the fruits of industry." Her suggestion: that Congress resume a study of profit-sharing plans which was broken off when war came.

Committeemen who made the study had reported that in 1939 profit-sharing companies formed "islands of 'peace, equity, efficiency and contentment,' and likewise prosperity, dotting an otherwise turbulent industrial map, all the way across the continent." To Mrs. Luce, these words still sounded more promising than anything yet said in 1946.

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