Boycotts Banned?

The War Labor Board last week made a significant move which can well be interpreted as meaning that henceforward the Government will not tolerate secondary or boycott strikes such as from time to time have tied up the trucking industry and which can constitute a real threat to production and distribution.

The occasion of the move was a strike of Chicago and Philadelphia printers who for the past three weeks refused to work on any printing job any part of which had been or would be worked on by R. R. Donnelley & Sons, which numbers among its customers Montgomery Ward, Sears. Roebuck and TIME Inc. Reason for this refusal on the part of the printers unions is that Donnelley is an "open shop" employing men belonging to independent unions as well as men belonging to the A.F. of L.

Although the unions in Donnelley have never demanded a showdown election in the shop they nevertheless brought pressure to bear on the smaller print shops to walk out as a form of protest. Typical result: Although Chicago print shops had been doing work on direct contract with Montgomery Ward for years, they could not continue this work because part of the work involved was done by Donnelley. Another: Although two union shops in the East do all but the front cover engravings of an international air express edition of TIME, the Philadelphia shop would not perform its part of the operation because these cover engravings were made by Donnelley.

The dispute was settled when the War Labor Board urged the unions to go back to work and the unions obeyed. Said one public member of the board: "The union was guilty of staging a secondary boycott and that in my opinion is a violation of the no-strike, no-lockout agreement, because under the facts of the case it amounted to a strike by subterfuge."

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