Call to Arms?

Both management and labor knew that the issue had to be joined eventually. Sooner or later the National Labor Relations Board would have to make one of its biggest decisions since the Taft-Hartley Act became law last summer. Last week, plainly following the letter of the law, NLRB did. It ruled that an employer has no legal obligation to deal with a union whose leaders have refused to sign affidavits that they are not Communists.

The board acted on behalf of two companies. The first was Herman Lowenstein, Inc., a leather manufacturer of Gloversville, N.Y. The company asked the board to hold an election to decide which of two contesting unions might represent its workers. One of the unions was the C.I.O. Fur & Leather Workers, whose president, Ben Gold, is an avowed Communist and naturally has not signed the affidavit. That ruled out his union as far as the election was concerned.

Much more newspaper noise was made two days later by the decision in the case of Remington Rand Inc., makers of office equipment. Remington Rand asked regional boards in Buffalo and Detroit for an election among 10,000 of its employees in six plants, to find out whether they still wanted the C.I.O.'s United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers to bargain for them.

U.E. is the largest Communist-dominated union in the land. U.E.'s leaders, from big-bellied Al Fitzgerald down, have denounced the law's non-Communist clause with furious fervor, have refused to sign the affidavits. This week the company, on the strength of the NLRB ruling, severed relations with U.E., despite an agreement which runs until April 1949.

Said NLRB's tough general counsel, Robert N. Denham: if Remington Rand signs a new contract with U.E., it does so at "its own peril." NLRB will not help to enforce it. Stormed U.E.'s Fitzgerald: "This is a call to arms to all employers to break contracts."

Observers wondered what employers would do about the 3,000,000 union men, including Phil Murray's Steelworkers and John Lewis' A.F.L. United Mine Workers, whose officers have not signed affidavits. New York's Daily News editorialized: "The repercussions may be widespread, even violent." A Steelworkers' spokesman in Washington put it this way: "Any company which tries to use the board as an excuse not to bargain will probably be pulling a strike on itself."

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