A Horse in a Hat

With the flat firmness of an operator saying, "Your time is up," nearly 340,000 of the country's telephone workers pulled the plug on the nation's long-distance calls this week. Labor Secretary Schwellenbach had called a last-minute conference of union and company officials. Union Attorney Henry Mayer cracked: "Mr. Schwellenbach thinks he pulled a rabbit out of the hat last year [when he settled a strike within a half-hour of the deadline]. He doesn't realize he is struggling with a horse this year."

Minutes before the deadline--6 a.m., Easter Monday--Schwellenbach's last appeal was spurned. In Manhattan's dawn Miss Eileen McDonnell removed her headset, took the elevator down to the street and picked up a picket sign. Across the country, by time zones, galloped Mr. Mayer's horse. At 9 a.m., E.S.T., workers quit the Pacific Telephone & Telegraph Co. offices in Los Angeles and for the first time in history a telephone walkout was nationwide.

Build a Monopoly. Some 18 million dial phones still worked, but that service would last only until there were mechanical breakdowns. Maintenance workers were among the strikers; so were clerical, accounting and plant workers of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co.'s vast Bell Systems. Workers at the subsidiary Western Electric joined the walkout.

The telephone workers mostly wanted higher wages. A year ago, just half an hour before a strike deadline, they had accepted a $5-to $8-a-week boost. They wanted a $12-a-week boost across the board. There were a number of other issues which were not as hot but just as hotly argued. One of them was the demand for a union shop.

That issue was important to 36-year-old Joseph Beirne, president of the National Federation of Telephone Workers, who called the strike. The N.F.T.W. represented 49 of the 83 unions in the Bell Systems' intricate labor setup. Beirne's ambition was to represent all 83, so that he could confront one of the nation's biggest industrial monopolies with one of the biggest labor monopolies--an organization of some 630,000 workers, mostly women.

Hold the Phone. Beirne, picked by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of ten outstanding young men of 1946 for his "mature responsibility as a labor leader," had begun negotiating in January. He is a determined and militant young man, a high-school graduate, who worked as a drill-press operator, department-store clerk, went to night school and leaped into labor politics as a district union representative.

His negotiations with A.T. & T. dragged along without sign of bearing fruit. Company officials made no counter wage offers, refused every effort to place the bargaining on an industrywide basis.

In Washington, the Administration held the phone, listening to the wrangle. Last week, as the deadline of the "impossible" walkout became imminent, Attorney General Tom Clark found a law (the Federal Communications Act) which he said gave the President the right to seize the lines in the event of a strike. Said Beirne: "He is stretching the law to the breaking point."

Seizure might still be the only solution. As the strike went through its first day, Schwellenbach kept the union and management in negotiation. But there was no hope of settlement unless both sides retreated from positions which they both considered basic.

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