Down the Middle

Nobody would have been surprised if the National Association of Manufacturers had broken out in a rash of antiunionism. With the headlines still smoking with the coal crisis, the 4,000 NAMsters who met last week in Manhattan's plush Waldorf-Astoria Hotel had a good right to be sorely provoked by organized labor.

Hardly less provoked were N.A.M.'s notable guests. Commerce Secretary W. Averell Harriman, famed New Dealer, opened the convention by crying out that labor power "has grown to the point where we find one man defying the Government and recklessly tearing down the life of the nation." Three days and 44 speeches later, even Field Marshal Jan Christian Smuts, Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, wryly worked Topic A into his address. Said Smuts: "Labor unions have developed a power which places them in a position not only to wage war on big business, but on society itself. . . ."

But if outsiders helped bring the problem into focus, the important thing for the future of U.S. enterprise was what the NAMsters themselves decided to do about it. Would they go on, as they had for years, behaving like any selfish union, crying: "Unfair to organized business"?

New Spirit. At first the answer seemed to be yes. Outgoing President Robert R. Wason cried that the big trouble was that a "collectivist government" had sold out to labor. In quaking anger, Bob Wason shouted: "The President lets the public freeze while his guts quiver!"

But soon it became apparent that a new spirit might be percolating through N.A.M.'s hardened arteries. Significantly, the man who first expressed it was hulking, able Walter B. Weisenburger, who, as executive vice president and thus N.A.M.'s top permanent officer, has often had to take the rap for N.A.M.'s reputation.

Business, said Walter Weisenburger, was ready to confess its sins. It had often opposed labor and social legislation while offering no constructive program of its own. But business had now learned better. Now, N.A.M. was trying to establish itself "as an organization . . . believing that industry and the country's welfare must move forward together." Henceforth, N.A.M. would try to solve the nation's legitimate economic problems with "no doubletalk, no weasel-wording, no ducking the tough ones."

Certainly, said he, the N.A.M. hoped to rectify "the unbalanced collective bargaining relationship between labor and management." But business must remember that U.S. voters "did not vote to destroy unions or to do away with collective bargaining; to deny labor the right to strike or to wipe out its legitimate gains."

New Practice. Was N.A.M. ready to practice this preaching?

First token that it was came from N.A.M.'s industrial relations committee, drawing up suggestions for a new federal labor policy. Some committee members, led by Chrysler Corp.'s finance chairman, B. E. Hutchinson, and the Michigan Manufacturers Association's hard-bitten general manager, John R. Lovett, were all for demanding quick repeal of the Wagner Act. But to committee chairman Clarence B. Randall, vice president of Inland Steel Co., plumping for outright repeal seemed just the sort of thing that had given N.A.M. a bad name in the past. N.A.M., said Randall, should be content to outline broad objectives, let Congress determine how to achieve them. In a showdown behind closed doors, Randall won easily.

The labor policy finally adopted asked that: unions as well as employers be made responsible for abiding by contracts, mass picketing and the closed shop be outlawed, employers be protected against jurisdictional and sympathy strikes. Labor leaders in their demagogic terminology might still call this "reactionary." But compared with how most Americans were feeling about big labor leaders this was moderate and conciliatory. In effect, NAMsters thought that if the scales were better balanced, the Wagner Act could work out to the advantage of business also.

New Preacher. To spread its new gospel, N.A.M. chose as its 1947 president a likely man to do it, big, genial Earl Bunting, 53, head of the O'Sullivan Rubber Corp. (makers of "America's No. 1 Heel"). Born on a farm in southern Illinois, Bunting studied engineering, ran his own consulting firms in Portland (Ore.) and Washington before he took over O'Sullivan's presidency in 1941.

At his plant in Winchester, Va. he employs 800, has a reputation for getting along well with their A.F.L. union. A Republican, he once hired Leon Henderson, New Dealingest of New Dealers, as commentator on an O'Sullivan radio program.

In his first press conference, he displayed a refreshing candor. Said Earl Bunting: "I'm scared stiff--I'm no big shot." For a scared man, he was refreshingly articulate. Said he: "I think it's time we unite this country. Much of our present strife is a 50-50 proposition, caused by stiff-necked managements and stiff-necked labor leaders. Employers have been as dumb as it's possible to be, not frank with either their employes or the public."

The N.A.M.'s effort to change, said Earl Bunting, "is an evolutionary thing, more than an about-face; it's an abandonment of prejudices which some of us have had in the past. It's our aim now to go right down the middle of the road."

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