"On the March"

Fortnight ago negotiations to end the great 1937 automobile labor war broke down when the United Automobile Workers failed to evacuate its sit-down strikers from two General Motors plants in Flint (TIME, Jan. 25). The fighting in Michigan having bogged down into trench warfare, the active front shifted last week to Washington. Thither went Michigan's Governor Frank Murphy, as he had planned to go anyhow to attend Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural. Thither went General Motors' President Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and Executive Vice President William S. Knudsen, thither Homer Martin, president of the striking union. In Washington all these could confer with the two other vitally interested parties to the strike: John L. Lewis, overlord of the Committee for Industrial Organization, to whom the unionization of the motor industry is but one strategic move in his great labor game; and the New Deal, in whose side the strike is a great thorn. On Inauguration Day the conference commenced. Next day John L. Lewis aborted it with a press statement which, even for him, touched a new high in boldness. To the President of the U. S., Leader Lewis issued the following public ultimatum: "We have advised the Administration through the Secretary of Labor and the Governor of Michigan that for six months the economic royalists represented by General Motors, the Du Fonts, Sloan and others contributed their money and used their energy to drive the President of the United States out of Washington and this Administration out of power. "The Administration asked Labor to help it repel this attack, and Labor helped the President to repel the economic royalists. The same economic royalists now have their fangs in Labor, and Labor expects the Administration to support the auto workers in every legal way in their fight. "Labor is on the march in this country toward those better things .and better days so eloquently described from time to time by the President of the United States." The words were hardly off Mr. Lewis' mimeograph when it appeared that he had made a tactical blunder in advertising quite so blatantly that he was on the march. First, and least important from Mr. Lewis' standpoint, Messrs. Sloan and Knudsen promptly walked out and abandoned their conference with Governor Murphy and Madam Secretary Perkins. Mr. Sloan declared that after Mr. Lewis' demand it was "futile" to continue. The press, including many liberal papers generally sympathetic with Mr. Lewis, expressed its disapprobation. The genteel New York Times said: "Mr. Lewis had a full supply of impudence with him." If President Roosevelt had been embarrassed by John Lewis' demand that his automobile union be accorded the right to speak for all General Motors workers, he had reason to be even more embarrassed by Mr. Lewis' calm assumption of the right to speak for all Labor. Overshadowed in the news though they had been by the C. I. O. chieftain and his 1,400,000 men, American Federation of Labor leaders still represented 2,000,000 unionists, wielded a Congressional influence which Franklin Roosevelt had no desire to antagonize, and remained bitterly hostile not only to John L. Lewis in general but to his automobile strike in particular. Questioned about the strike in a press conference, the President gave bold Mr. Lewis his answer by saying: "I have no further news than you've got. Of course, I think in the interest of peace, there come moments when statements, conversation and headlines are not in order." The words were mild enough but the fact that the President took the unusual step of authorizing them for direct quotation showed that he wished them to sink in.

Bellicose John Lewis--pretending that the President's words were no rebuke and showing by his attitude that he plainly thought they were -- blustered: "I do not believe the President intended to rebuke the working people of America who are his friends and who are only attempting to obtain rights guaranteed to them by Congress in a declaration of public policy in the National Labor Relations Act." Curious was Mr. Lewis' reference to the National Labor Relations Act. for his United Automobile WTorkers failed to invoke it in practice. Last week Strike Leader Homer Martin proclaimed that the union had enrolled 75% of the workers in General Motors' plants. General Motors responded that 110,000 of its 135,000 motors production employes had signed petitions or otherwise protested against being thrown out of work by the strike of the upstart union. This, said the union, was due to company coercion. Impartial observers did not credit the union's claim that it had the support of a majority, and the union made no attempt to prove it in the one way possible: by appealing to the National Labor Relations Board which would order an election. Making peace as well as making war was part of John L. Lewis' strategy. In Detroit a 24-day strike of Bohn Aluminum & Brass Corp., makers of parts for Ford and others, was settled with an agreement to boost minimum wages from 50^ to 65^ an hour. In Pittsburgh the gS-day strike of Pittsburgh Plate Glass workers was settled with an agreement to boost wages 8/ an hour, establish a minimum wage of 63^ an hour. Libbey-Owens-Ford glass workers on strike for five weeks again failed to make a settlement, but it seemed that glass-labor troubles would soon be over. More important to Mr. Lewis than the wage increases thus won was the settle-ment of these strikes, which might have shut down a good part of the motor industry. In fact last week Chrysler plants shut down for two days because of a shortage of glass. The threat of a general shut-down had showed signs of inciting the public.

Mr. Lewis was not only pleased to have that threat removed but also pleased because it strengthened his hand against General Motors, which will now have to watch its competitors get business while its plants are shut down. Far from resting on its arms, G. M. continued to cultivate with spirit and shrewdness the public sympathy drawn to it by: 1) its reasonableness in offering to negotiate any issue when the strikers should cease their "unlawful occupation" of its plants; 2) the plight of non-union workers unwillingly deprived of work & pay. In Manhattan, President Sloan issued a vigorous statement rehearsing both points. Listeners to the nation-wide General Motors radio hour heard a homily on "The Right to Work." In Detroit, Vice President Knudsen announced that, to give 95,000 nonstriking employes at least part-time work, G. M. would this week reopen all the plants it could, build up inventories of parts and perhaps produce complete trucks at the Chevrolet plant in Indianapolis.

Non-unionists among the 31,000 employes of the 17 strike-closed plants would unfortunately have to keep on shifting for themselves. G. M., said Mr. Knudsen emphatically, had no intention of provoking violence by employing strikebreakers. As neither side showed signs of yielding, Madam Secretary Perkins this week invoked the Congressional statute which empowers the Secretary of Labor to mediate a labor dispute "whenever . . . the interests of industrial peace so re- quire." virtually commanded the G. M. and C. I. O. leaders to resume with her at once the conference which John Lewis had disrupted.

While John Lewis hesitated, Alfred Sloan sent to Secretary Perkins a flat refusal to confer, on the grounds that strikers were still illegally in possession of G. M.

plants.

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