Automobile Armageddon

(On a frosty February day at the Century's turn, a gangling, 20-year-old Danish immigrant with $30 in his pocket ambled down a gangplank at Ellis Island. He was gawking at the New World's wonders when an impetuous deckhand bumped him from behind, let out a. roar: "Hurry up, you s-- o-a b--!" After 37 years, Signius Wilhelm Poul Knudsen, known now as Vice President William S. Knudsen of General Motors, still likes to tell about this introduction to his adopted land, says that he accepted it forthwith as the national gospel. Chuckles he: "I've been hurrying ever since." Dane Knudsen's first U. S. job was in a Morris Heights, N. Y. shipyard, as reamer and riveter at $1.75 per day. Evenings he spent in his boarding house, improving his English by listening to the landlady's children. When the shipyard shut down for the winter, he moved on to a job repairing locomotive boilers in the Erie R. R. shops in Salamanca, N. Y., at $100 per month.

He thought that was good pay until he learned that the man next to him was getting the same wage after 35 years. Then he quit. In Denmark he had worked in a bicycle plant and he now became bench hand in the John R. Keim Mills at Buffalo, a bicycle factory which was branching into automobile parts. In less than four years he was assistant manager; in five, manager. When Henry Ford bought the Keim Mills in 1911, "Bill" Knudsen found himself, like many another oldtime bicycle man, in the stripling automobile industry.

As Mr. Ford's production manager in his great expansion period, Motorman Knudsen had a prime hand in creating modern mass production. He had a front-trench post during the young industry's war for survival in which hundreds of motor manufacturers were killed off. A $50,000-a-year Fordman in 1921, he next year entered General Motors as adviser to a vice president. Three years after he was president of Chevrolet. There his production genius is credited with forcing Ford to give up Model T for Model A. When a new job was created for him in 1933, as executive vice president in charge of all G. M. operations, William S. Knudsen had unquestionably made his the biggest automobile operations job in the world. He remained as friendly and democratic as he had been when a bicycle plant assistant manager.

Leaping Parson. Two years after William Knudsen arrived in the U. S., a son was born to a rural schoolman named Martin on a farm near Marion, Ill. Named Homer, the boy grew up lithe, springy, idealistic, became a star track man at Missouri's tiny William Jewell college, won the national hop, step & jump championship in 1924. Having begun preaching when he was 19, he was dubbed "The Leaping Parson." In 1931, brimming with zeal for applied Christianity, Homer Martin was called to the pulpit of small Leeds Baptist Church on the outskirts of Kansas City. Most of his 400 parishioners were employes of the nearby Chevrolet plant, but a few were employers. At them Preacher Martin hammered Sunday after Sunday with his gospel of justice for workingmen. He protested publicly against the 75-c--per-day wages which some members of his flock were paying, invited labor organizers to speak from his pulpit. Irate deacons soon gave him a choice of quitting his agitating or quitting his pulpit. He quit the latter, went to work for Chevrolet in 1933.

First thing Worker Martin learned about was the "speed-up." Put to work with four others on a truck assembly line, within a week he found himself and one other doing the work of the original five. "Working conditions" became a reality one day when several completed trucks slipped off their runway, crashed down on the spot where he would have been standing if he had not been at lunch. He went to the foreman, got steel posts put up which saved his life next time some trucks crashed down. Meantime he had become vice president of the local automobile union, one of the so-called "Federal unions" which the American Federation of Labor was chartering under the aegis of NRA. He learned one method of fighting unionism in 1934 when he and 25 other members of his union were abruptly discharged. Rehired, he was fired again when he became president of the union. Said he to his foreman: "You'll regret putting me on the street. When I work nine hours a day I'm too tired at night to think much about union organization. But things will be different now. I'll start working immediately and I'll not stop until every General Motors plant is organized."

Chiefly because the bulk of its workers were unskilled or semiskilled, floating from plant to plant and city to city during seasonal layoffs, the automobile industry never had a union worth mentioning until the Blue Eagle was hatched in 1933. The A. F. of L., Homer Martin soon discovered, was really interested only in preserving the power & privilege of its unions of skilled craftsmen, which had no place for the automobile working masses. He went along, nonetheless, and when automobile locals were merged into a United Automobile Workers International Union, he was appointed vice president. Young, educated, eloquent, he was an out-of-the-ordinary Labor leader. Last spring the Union progressives revolted against their do-nothing A. F. of L. leadership, booted out their president, upped Homer Martin to his job, later lined up with dynamic John L. Lewis' Committee for Industrial Organization.

The Battle. Last week in Detroit the paths which began in Copenhagen and on an Illinois farm had met. William Knudsen and Homer Martin, as opposing field generals, were locked in one of the crucial industrial battles of U. S. history--the struggle of United Automobile Workers to make good General Martin's old boast, organize all 69 automobile plants of giant General Motors Corp.* (TIME, Jan. 11).

Behind General Martin ranged burly John L. Lewis with his 1,400,000 organized workmen of the C. I. O. unions, his surging ambition to become leader of millions more in the automobile, steel, rubber, textile and other mass industries of the U. S.

Behind General Knudsen and his Generalissimo President Alfred P. Sloan Jr. stood G. M.'s mighty masters, the du Ponts, Chairman Lammot, Directors Pierre, Irenee and Henry, with all their own prodigious resources of wealth and power, plus those of the great industries linked with motors by business and financial interdependence, and in a common defense against John Lewis' offensive. On the battle's outcome, informed observers agreed, hung the whole future of U. S. industrial relations.

Flanked by their advisers, the rival generals maneuvered from headquarters two miles apart. G. M.'s Knudsen in the big General Motors Building on Grand Boulevard West, U. A. W.'s Martin in the Hofmann Building on downtown Woodward Avenue. Their battlefield was the whole U. S. As the week began. 14 G. M. plants had been closed or crippled by U. A. W. "sitdown" strikes, throwing 40,600 employes out of work. When the week ended, 28 plants and 93,000 out of a total 135,000 production employes were idle.

Laymen got some idea of the magnitude and complexity of G. M.'s production mechanism when it was calculated that closing of the Flint plant which makes Chevrolet motors would force closing, whether workers had struck or not, of Chevrolet assembly and parts plants in Detroit, Saginaw and Bay City, Mich.; Toledo and Norwood, Ohio; St. Louis and Kansas City, Mo.; Janesville, Wis.; Oakland, Calif.; Buffalo and Tarrytown, N. Y.; Atlanta, Ga.; Indianapolis, Ind.; Bloomfield, N. J.

All week Michigan's New Deal Governor Frank Murphy and the Department of Labor's crack Conciliator James F. Dewey shuttled back & forth between G. M. and U. A. W. headquarters, trying vainly to bring Generals Knudsen and Martin together at a conference table. Each side conceded one point at issue, stood firm on another. General Martin offered to lay aside, until a conference should begin, his demand that U. A. W. be recognized as sole bargaining agency for G. M. workers. General Knudsen backed down on his earlier insistence that all G. M. bargaining must be by individual plants, offered to treat with the Union nationally on matters of "general corporate policy." But he would not do that unless U. A. W. should first withdraw its sit-downers, whom he denounced as lawless trespassers, from the Corporation's plants. With the strikers in possession, G. M. could not send strikebreakers into its plants or remove vital dies and machinery for use in other plants without provoking violence. Hugging this advantage, General Martin refused to call out his sit-downers until G. M. should promise in writing not to remove dies and machinery during negotiations. This General Knudsen would not do. At week's end negotiations collapsed. This week General Knudsen & staff commenced a "sitdown" of their own, General Martin flew to Washington to confer with Generalissimo Lewis.

Interested Judge. When G. M. got Circuit Judge Edward D. Black of Flint to issue an injunction last fortnight ordering Flint sit-downers to evacuate the two local Fisher Body plants, they hooted down the sheriff who tried to read it to them. Last week General Martin scored by asserting that Judge Black owned 3,665 shares of G. M. stock worth $219,900, petitioning the Michigan Legislature to impeach him for violation of a State law forbidding a judge to sit in any case "in which he is a party or in which he is interested." Judge Black admitted ownership of the stock, assailed the union leaders as "irresponsibles.'" The county bar association denounced Homer Martin for his effrontery, but the American Bar Association, convening in Columbus, Ohio, referred the matter to a committee for investigation. Protesting that it had been unaware of Judge Black's stock ownership, G. M. shifted its injunction proceedings to another court.

Labor v. Labor. "There will be no violence," promised Governor Murphy when he entered the strike as mediator last week. "The day of violence in labor disputes has passed in the United States." Same day in Cleveland, pickets tried to keep a Fisher Body manager out of his plant. When police tried to clear a path, an officer was knocked down, two picketers were hurt and bruised.

Three days later violence flared up in Governor Murphy's State. In Flint's Chevrolet assembly plant, non-union workmen faced with loss of their jobs because of the strike listened resentfully to the voice of a U. A. W. organizer blaring from a loudspeaker at union headquarters across the street. As shifts were changing someone smashed the amplifier, caused a general scuffle. Heads were banged and two U. A. W. men landed in jail. That night 200 unionists demonstrated in front of the lockup, were routed by tear gas. Again in Flint rival groups clashed in front of a Fisher Body plant. City police, called after strikers had locked up three private company policemen in the plant, used fire hose and tear gas to scatter a crowd outside. In the all-night battle which followed, 19 persons were injured. Governor Murphy moved into Flint, mobilizing State police and National Guardsmen.

More important than these brawls was the non-union bitterness they highlighted. No one, not even President Martin, knew last week how many workers belonged to his Union. Publicly he claims "over 100,000," privately puts the number closer to 150,000. Without allowance for the usual exaggeration of union claims, his membership was still a decided minority of the industry's 450,000 employes. Formed was a Flint Alliance of 8,500 citizens, headed by onetime Mayor George Boysen. to combat the strike. In Flint and elsewhere some 47,000 G. M. employes were reported to have signed petitions declaring themselves content with their lot, anxious to keep on working. President Martin cried "vigilantes" at the Flint Alliance, denounced Leader Boysen as a onetime G. M. paymaster, accused G. M. of obtaining the petition signatures by intimidation, promised to complain to the National Labor Relations Board. But that many a G. M. worker hated & feared the union for depriving or threatening to deprive him of his pay was one of the darkest clouds on U. A. W.'s horizon.

Another was the enmity of the American Federation of Labor, with which John Lewis and his "rebel"' C. I. O. unions are now contesting for the mastery of U. S. Labor (TIME, Dec. 7 et ante). In Detroit and Cleveland, city labor councils voted to back the U. A. W. strike. But local councils are small potatoes in the A. F. of L. patch of jealous craft unions. First Federation gun was fired last week when the Cleveland heads of the Plumbers', Machinists', Electrical Workers' and Bricklayers' unions sent Fisher Superintendent Scafe a joint letter denouncing U. A. W. as an "outlaw'' union, demanding that the struck plant be reopened. Next day the big guns opened up. signaling the start of long-awaited open warfare between A. F. of L. and C. I. O. With four of A. F. of L.'s vice presidents among them, the national chiefs of ten Federation unions and departments, mostly those including skilled automobile craftsmen, wired General Motors warning it on no account to recognize U. A. W. as sole bargaining agency for its workers.

Management v. Labor. Whether or not big, genial, soft-voiced William Knudsen sat in his office last week with hat on head, as he often does from oldtime factory habit, the press could not report. With G. M.'s lanky President Sloan who sped out from Manhattan to fight at his side, he entered the General Motors Building daily by a basement entrance, refused to see newshawks. Having declared his position last fortnight, he issued only a brief statement on the failure of negotiations last week. But impartial observers, examining his career for clues to the strike's probable course, could conjecture what he was thinking. Set down in black & white, this representative motorman's credo might run somewhat as follows:

His 1935 salary & bonus as revealed by Congress last week totaled $325,869. He had become the seventh highest-paid person in the U. S. by merit, starting from scratch. Perhaps he had been toughened by the struggle for survival within the industry, had driven his men hard in the hated "speed-up." But he had also driven himself hard, been "hurrying ever since." Certainly he was under obligation to treat G. M.'s 135,000 production employes as well as possible. But he was also under obligation to G. M.'s 330,000 stockholders to produce automobiles as efficiently as he knew how. If he had opposed unionism, it was because he believed that the business of Management was to manage the business, of Labor to labor; that there could be no confusion of functions. Why should he not be outraged when ambitious outsiders like John Lewis and Homer Martin demanded the right to tell the men who had built the automobile industry how to run their business?

President Sloan put the case succinctly in the notice which he posted on G. M. bulletin boards last week, spread across the land in full-page newspaper advertisements: "Wages, working conditions, honest collective bargaining have little, if anything, to do with the underlying situation. They are simply a smoke screen to cover the real objective. . . . That real issue is perfectly clear, and here it is: Will a labor organization run the plants of General Motors Corporation or will the management continue to do so?"

U. A. W.'s Martin hotly protested that the union had no desire to run General Motors, simply wanted to "run our end of collective bargaining." Of President Sloan's further charge that "labor dictators" were seeking to exact "tribute" from workers, he observed: "The tribute which I, as an elected official, exact from the union is $3,000 a year. Mr. Sloan's annual salary and bonus totaled $374,475."

No less than that of grey William Knudsen was young Homer Martin's viewpoint explicit in his career. He had known anti-union discrimination and the nerve-racking speed-up at first hand. He had seen automobile Labor, with a scattering of small unions, repeatedly frustrated and defeated in its attempts to right its wrongs. It was obviously presumptuous of him to demand, when he could not even claim to represent a majority of G. M. employes, that his union be recognized as sole bargaining agency for them all. But if there was to be industrial democracy in G. M., he had to be presumptuous. Only a potent national union could hope to bargain effectively with so great and centralized an organization as General Motors.

"Wages. Not even Homer Martin, however, could complain that the automobile industry is a sweated one. Always famed for comparatively high daily pay, it has since 1935 materially increased its workers' yearly earnings by introducing new models in November instead of January, thus leveling off its concentrated production periods and corresponding layoffs. General Motors has twice set aside a $60,000,000 revolving fund to finance slack-season production of parts, thereby upping its workers' annual pay by $400 to $500 apiece. In 1936 the "average" G. M. employe worked 40.2 hours per week, earned 78.6-c- per hour for a year's total of $1,490. Last week the National Industrial Conference Board announced that, at $36.16, the average weekly earnings of automobile workers in November topped the list of the 25 manufacturing industries which report to it, were 40% above the average.

Handicapped by these facts, Unionist Martin bolstered his case by charging that G. M.'s employes were not so well off as those of other motor manufacturers. Studebaker, he declared, had lately upped its 87-c--per-hour average pay by increases of 5-c- to 25-c-. As for labor relations, he asserted, only Ford was worse than G. M.

Studebaker, Nash, Graham-Paige and Willys-Overland were "not only friendly [to U. A. WJ] but 100% organized," while Chrysler, Hudson and Packard were "fair" to the union. These revelations strengthened Washington reports that John L. Lewis had no intention of trying to tie up the whole automobile industry, since G. M.'s resistance to a long strike would obviously be weakened if its competitors were able to seize its markets. If this was Leader Lewis' strategy, however, he was would have to end promptly the C. I. O. strikes which last week continued to keep U. S. plate glass production almost at a standstill (TIME, Dec. 28). Though Chrysler was reported to have begun importing glass from Belgium, in rumor-ridden Detroit it was widely believed that Chrysler and every other motor manufacturer except Ford, which makes some glass of its own, would soon have to shut down for lack of glass.

President's Spot. Campaigning through Michigan last October, Democratic Nominee Roosevelt observed in Detroit: "I have suggested that the automobile industry and every other industry still need great improvements in their relationship to their employes. ... It is my belief that the manufacturers of automobiles and the manufacturers of many other necessary commodities must, by planning, do far more than they have done to date to increase the yearly earnings of those who work for them." Last week, safely returned to office, President Roosevelt had reason to view with embarrassment the battle of Labor to put his campaign words into effect. A prolonged G. M. shutdown would be a staggering setback to Recovery and re-employment. Yet if his good political friend, John Lewis, failed to trounce his erstwhile political foes, the du Ponts and Alfred Sloan, it might mean the end of C. I. O. If, on the other hand, John Lewis should win, that victory would be only a beginning. Washington correspondents were sure last week that Leader Lewis was only waiting until he had crippled Steel by cutting off its biggest customer before launching the "big push" of his Steel-organizing campaigning. Bituminous coal operators charged that he was preparing to close their mines by a strike of his United Mine Workers, in order to freeze out the coal-burning motor and steel industries. Plainly, a President who cherished both Labor and Recovery was on a spot even hotter than that of G. M.'s Knudsen.

The first public plea for Presidential intervention, from non-union Chevrolet workers in Detroit who wanted their jobs back, reached the White House at week's end. President Roosevelt continued to sit tight, keep mum. Secretary of Labor Perkins and Assistant Secretary McGrady reported their talks with Leader Lewis; Governor Murphy kept the President abreast of news at the front. The President denied that Mr. Murphy was acting as his representative, met other press conference questions on the strike with suave evasions. The White House visitor-of-the-week, Board Chairman Myron Taylor of U. S. Steel, came & went without dropping a hint of the President's purposes (see p. 13).

That John L. Lewis was grim and daring enough to fight the automobile battle to a finish, there could be no doubt.

Whether C. I. O. was rich enough, remained a question. The answer to it might be the same as to a newshawk's query which President Roosevelt last week dismissed as hypothetical. That question: Would the U. A. W. strikers be given Relief? Unless the precedent set in the textile strike of 1934 was to be revoked, they would. Then the great battle of G. M. and A. F. of L. v. C. I. O. would acquire a fourth combatant--the U. S. Government.

*G. M. also includes Frigidaire Corp., ElectroMotive Corp. (locomotives), Winton engine manufacturing (Diesels).

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