New Labor Board Chairman

The National Labor Relations Board has been stalled since last August, when Chairman J. Warren Madden 's term expired. The remaining Board members, William Leiserson and Edwin S. Smith, in almost continuous disagreement, dead locked. Without Madden to cast the deciding vote, work of the Board practically ceased.

C. I. O.'s John Lewis wanted Madden reappointed. A. F. of L.'s William Green loudly and vehemently did not. The appointment was among those embarrassing subjects which President Roosevelt preferred to shelve until after election. Last week he settled the dispute, sent to the Senate for confirmation the name of Dr. Harry Alvin Millis.

First result was general relief that unsettled labor disputes, which had been hanging for months, were going to be disposed of at last. Second result was hearty applause from William Green and industry, silence that implied approval even from C. I. O. Third was the immediate resignation of some of the Board's assistants: pinkish Secretary Nathan Witt, Chief Administrative Examiner Alexander B. Hawes, Associate General Counsel Thomas I. Emerson.

Dr. Millis was expected to range his hefty, slow-moving bulk alongside gnomelike, conservative Dr. Leiserson. No grassgreen mediator, 67-year-old Dr. Millis has been listening to labor disputes for 20 years. No stranger to NLRB, he had served on the Board once before, in 1934-35 under NRA. Emeritus professor of economics at the University of Chicago, he has written scholarly, dull, copiously annotated books. As a mediator he is known for oxlike patience, horse sense. His present job: permanent conciliator between General Motors Corp. and C. I. O.'s United Automobile Workers.

A glutton for work, Dr. Millis declared that men should be willing to work ten or twelve hours a day in a national emergency, though 40 hours was enough under ordinary circumstances. "Where the work isn't fun the worker is under a nervous strain and needs leisure." For him, he said, work was fun, and he was willing to work 60 to 90 hours a week.

Mr. Roosevelt looked around on behalf of disappointed Mr. Madden, found a $12,500 judgeship in the U. S. Court of Claims, and kicked him upstairs into it.

Last week and this the U. S. Supreme Court handed down two decisions which indicated that the U. S. was at last on the road to a reasonable body of workable labor laws. In one it ruled that Republic Steel Corp. need not reimburse WTPA for the wages it paid to discharged and locked out Republic employes during the Little Steel strike of 1937. The ruling spanked the Labor Board for trying to make a penal statute out of the Wagner Act, which is essentially remedial.

In its second decision the Court reversed a Chicago Federal judge who had enjoined an A. F. of L. Milk Wagon Drivers' Union from picketing, because that activity violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The injunction could not be granted, ruled the court, because the controversy involved a labor dispute. The ruling was a clear-cut victory for the Norris-LaGuardia Act, which limits the granting of injunctions in labor disputes, paves the way for collective bargaining.

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