Chamber & Labor

The austere, stone cool halls and courtyard of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce headquarters in Washington are reminiscent of the new Supreme Court Building. In them, during the New Deal, some 2,000 Chambermen have assembled annually to exchange sentiments neither judicial nor austere nor cool. Last week, when the Chamber convened for its 28th annual meeting with an attendance less than half of last year's, it was chiefly concerned not with baiting the New Deal but with facing the great reality of the National Labor Relations Act.

Lead-off man in the discussion was President Colby Mitchell Chester of the National Association of Manufacturers, prime salesman of U. S. Business to the Consumer (TIME, Sept. 28). Said he: "You cannot blame Management for expecting a note of responsibility to enter into such [collective bargaining] negotiations. . . . Industry invites--yes, eagerly welcomes--Labor's co-operation in the complicated problems confronting us. But Labor needs to visualize a bit more the predicament facing Management."

Next day long-nosed Hamper Sibley, the Chamber's retiring president, got a little closer to the point. "It is obvious," he said, "that the broad question of employer-employe relationship is far from settled. It cannot be settled by force. It cannot be settled by attempting to throw legal safeguards around the rights of one of the groups concerned, but sharply limiting the rights of other groups. . . . Bargaining cannot be one-sided."

Thus adjured and fortified, the Chamber got down to cases Tuesday afternoon in one of the longest luncheon sessions on convention records. From one o'clock to four, while a thunderstorm swept hail over the Capital, members watched their cigaret butts accumulate, groped to formulate ideas out of their resentment at the long disregarded law which the Supreme Court had upheld. Across Lafayette Park in the White House, President Roosevelt was giving his last press conference before entraining for New Orleans (see p. 15). At the convention tables, the Chamber-men to whom he had refused for the third successive year to send any greeting throbbed with approval as President B. C. Heacock of Caterpillar Tractor Co. told how he settled a sit-down by CIO "brigands." With comfort they listened to a running fire of legal advice on the Wagner Act by John D. Black, member of the Chicago law firm of Silas Hardy Strawn, potent onetime president of the Chamber. Might they fire sit-downers? someone asked. Replied Lawyer Black, eyes flashing:

"Participation in a sit-down strike is the performance of an illegal act and if any occurred in a plant of mine I wouldn't hesitate to advise discharge."

On Wednesday, industry's fighting question had its fullest airing on the convention floor, with the Administration represented by Assistant Secretary of Labor Edward Francis McGrady. From deft, dapper Ed McGrady the Chambermen heard a quick response to their session with Lawyer Black. "The greatest mistake that I believe any employer could now make," said he, "is again to call in the lawyers and attempt to try to frustrate, avoid or nullify this law." Mr. McGrady's unintentional redundancy in "attempt to try" implied more than he stated of the Administration's view of what fate such action would have. He reminded his audience that the Wagner Act was written to "rectify a condition unfair to the other side," asked them to look at the records of old Labor leaders like Green and Lewis if they doubted the responsibility of such men.

Politely applauded, Mr. McGrady sat down. Up rose Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co.'s bulky President Paul W. Litchfield to sketch Big Business' most liberal idea of what the Wagner Act should sooner or later be modified to mean. Mr. Litchfield's model was the Railway Act (TIME, April 26) by which President Roosevelt had just averted a Manhattan railroad strike with a mandatory "cooling off period" of 60 days. Said moderate Mr. Litchfield: "Above all else the Railway Labor Act rests on the premise that the public interest is far superior to that of either Management or Labor."

After all this moderation the time seemed ripe to many a Chamberman for a good old-fashioned tirade against the Roosevelt Revolution. Hopes, however high, fell short of the next speaker's actual performance. President Virgil Dustin Jordan of the National Industrial Conference Board is 44 years old, six feet tall, curly-haired, weighs 210 lb., wears a wing collar and in his stern moments resembles a baleful Bourbon Apollo. Even listless Chambermen who sat around the goldfish pond in the courtyard getting the speeches through amplifiers joined in the whistling and cheering when he finished. Drawing his conclusions from the work of his Board, which gathers statistics for 1,096 corporations. President Jordan pronounced nothing less than the doom of private enterprise:

"The destruction of the enterprise principle will . . . make every one of us a mere cell in a political body, subject to the spreading bureaucratic cancer of the State. . . . Everyone will live at the expense of everyone else. . . . The intelligent, energetic, ambitious and able. people in the population will become the suckers of the State, distinguished for a while in the sucker lists, but they will ultimately give up the struggle ... and will sink back to the dead level of the mass. Then the American species will become extinct, and America will become the habitat of a horde of number-bearing, taxpaying, dole-eating, invertebrate animals."

At its concluding session next day the Chamber authorized its directors to draft a program for amendment of the Wagner Act on nine points: 1) a curb on sit-down strikes; 2) prohibition of political contri-butions by unions; 3) outlawing of "intimidation" by unions; 4) limitation of picketing to "giving information"; 5) compulsory arbitration of labor disputes in public utilities; 6) prohibition of strikes by Government employes; 7) public registration of both employer and employe groups negotiating labor agreements; 8) definition of ''unlawful labor practices" under the Wagner Act; 9) establishment of the responsibility of Labor. Elected president of the Chamber and charged with pressing these points on Congress was 61-year-old George Harvey Davis, president of Davis-Noland-Merrill Grain Co. of Kansas City. If he wore octagonal glasses, stocky, brown-eyed, greying President Davis might be mistaken for his good friend Alfred Mossman Landon. Said he: "My only interest is to make the Chamber a super business organization with a united front."

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