Strikes of the Week

Maine's Androscoggin River, some 30 miles before it flows down to the sea, divides the cities of Lewiston and Auburn, built upon a thriving shoe industry. Month ago 19 shoe factories of the twin towns were closed by a strike of the United Shoe Workers of America, a C.I.O. union. In Lewiston, last week, Associate Justice Harry Manser of Maine's Supreme Judicial Court handed down a temporary injunction denying the union's right to call the strike. His grounds: the Wagner Labor Act. Said he:

"Testimony shows that six people, not duly elected to represent the shoe workers of Lewiston and Auburn, issued a call for the union to come here. . . .

"The union should have proceeded in the method provided under the Wagner Act and made certain they had the required percentage of workers before calling the strike. . . .

"The Act has been invoked by the defense as justification for what has been done. Instead, in my opinion, what has been done is a direct violation of the Act."

That night State police turned back a crowd of strikers who tried to march across a bridge over the Androscoggin from Lewiston to Auburn. By next day the situation was more serious. Powers Hapgood--a graduate of Harvard (1921) and nephew of Editor Norman Hapgood, former Minister to Denmark; husband of Mary Donovan who was Socialist candidate in 1928 for Governor of Massachusetts; himself Socialist candidate in 1932 for Governor of Indiana--was not so many years ago, as an irregular union organizer in the coal mines of West Virginia, very much at odds with John L. Lewis. Now secretary for the C.I.O. in New England, he appeared at Lewiston fresh from a conference with Leader Lewis. When strikers emerged from a union meeting and tried again to cross the Androscoggin, police used tear gas and clubs to turn them back. In Auburn another riot ensued when police dispersed a crowd that advanced on two shoe factories that were still operating.

That night Governor Lewis 0. Barrows called eight companies of militia on duty.

Next morning at 7 o'clock Powers Hapgood and four C.I.O. lieutenants were arrested, charged with "inciting to riot." Bailed out, Powers Hapgood addressed a still bigger union meeting, cried: "We're going to continue the strike, injunction or no injunction. . . . We like law and order when properly enforced . . . don't let the National Guard worry you. I'm a little sorry for the little boys outside in the tin hats. They're getting their feet wet. Some of 'em may get a little bit of pneumonia." The crowd laughed for it was sleeting outside and the young guardsmen had no comfortable assignment patrolling the bridges and guarding the factories. Next day with better weather, the guardsmen had a still harder time, for some strikers outflanked them by crossing the Androscoggin on the ties of a railroad bridge, kept the military shuttling back and forth to points of danger. When employers appealed to Judge Manser to forbid C.I.O.'s running a commissary to feed strikers on the ground that this broke the injunction forbidding the union to abet the strike, Leader Hapgood's wife, in charge of the food depot, cried: 'If they close it, the blood will be on their hands not ours." The Judge decided that since the union was responsible for the strike it had better feed the strikers than allow them to become public charges, but ordered seven C.I.O. leaders to trial for directly flouting his injunction.

P: First important post-Supreme Court labor election held under the Wagner Act was held last week in the plant of Hershey Chocolate Corp. where sit-down strikers were recently ousted by a mob of indignant farmers (TIME, April 19). Result: 781 for the C.I.O. United Chocolate Workers' Union; 1,542 votes against.

P: In Philadelphia, about 250 employes sat down in the Torresdale Hosiery Mills operated by Marshall Field & Co. of Chicago. Marshall Field had decided to move its plant to Virginia. "Separation compensation" (up to two weeks' pay for employes of over ten years' standing) was promised employes, but the strikers demanded that the machinery should be left and the plant sold to another firm so that they could have jobs.

P: In Toledo, 35 strikers who had sat down in the France Foundry Co. for 22 days indignantly got up when they heard that the company had gone out of business the day after their sit-down commenced.

P: In Oshawa, Ont, the 16-day strike of General Motors of Canada, Ltd. ended when the strikers voted 2,205 to 36 to accept a 5-c- to 7-c- hourly wage increase, a 44-hour instead of a 50-hour week. Ontario's Premier Mitchell Hepburn crowed that he had achieved a victory because C.I.O.'s United Automobile Workers were not a party to the settlement which was made between the company and its "employes." Observers doubted whether he had finally beaten C.I.O., whose organizing drives in the gold mines and paper mills of northern Canada are going on apace. He had succeeded, however, in alienating the support of the Toronto Star, largest daily newspaper in Canada, in popularizing the Nazi salute, given with the ironical cry, "Heil Hepburn!"

P: In Richmond, Calif., 1,200 workers sat down in a Ford assembly plant charging discrimination against union members, announcing, "We are in for a long stay." In a few hours, however, they marched out. Over the week-end a settlement was reached when the Ford management promised that there would be no discrimination against union members. The C.I.O. was not yet ready to challenge Henry Ford.

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