Back to Work

The "sick" switchmen played out their hand to the bitter end. Some of the strikers responded to Charles Wilson's appeal to return (TIME, Feb. 12). But it took Harry Truman's stinging rebuke and the threat of a club to get the rest of them back and the trains running. The Army, theoretical boss of the roads since they were seized last summer, did what no private boss can do: it ordered the workers to work or be fired.

That did it. One of the most damaging strikes in recent years ended.

But the Railway Labor Act, once the model machinery for settling labor disputes through prolonged negotiation, mediation and sweet reasonableness, was a shambles. Mr. Truman was bitter, although the fact of the matter was that he himself and Franklin Roosevelt were as responsible as anyone for the wreck of the act.

The act had worked very well from 1934 to 1941. Then Franklin Roosevelt upset its balanced give & take; he went over the heads of his own fact-finding board to give the brotherhoods exactly what they were demanding. After that, the brotherhoods merely went through the act's routine, agreed to nothing and sat back each time to wait for the generous award which they knew they could get from the Great White Father.

For the most part, Mr. Truman had followed the policy of Mr. Roosevelt.

This week, although the strike was over, nothing was really settled in a wage dispute which had been going on for almost two years. As a small sop, the Army temporarily boosted wages by half the amount the carriers had agreed to pay last December (an amount which the brotherhoods had rejected). No one expected the brotherhoods to be satisfied with that. The brotherhoods smarted under their defeat, under the President's harsh words, and, incidentally, under a federal judge's verdict that William P. Kennedy's Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen was in contempt of court ($25,000 fine) for defying a back-to-work order last December.

One oddly bright spot in the whole sorry affair was the fact that the ill-famed Long Island Rail Road, generally on the receiving end of commuters' brickbats because of its erratic operation, kept running steadily all through the strike.

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