"Cooling Off"

On Vermont Avenue near K Street, well off-centre in official Washington, stands the inconspicuous, yellowish little Denrike Building. Its ninth floor is occupied by Federal Laboratories, Inc., whose business, according to evidence lately presented before the Senate Civil Liberties Committee, consists largely of furnishing employers with arms and tear gas for use against striking workers. On the fourth to seventh floors are housed the National Labor Relations Board and its no employes. Since October 1935, obscured by a cloud of uncertain legality, hedged about by injunctions, its authority doubted by Labor and challenged by Capital, the Board has labored inconspicuously to substitute law and reason for guns and gas in ordering the relations of U. S. employers and employes.

Until last week a political observer could consider himself well informed if he knew that a man named Smith was a member of NLRB. Last week it became inexcusable to be ignorant of the fact that there are two men named Smith on the three-man Board. For with certification of the National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act by the Supreme Court (TIME, April 19), NLRB stepped out from under its cloud into the full sunlight of rank and power.

Donald Wakefield Smith, 38 and the Board "baby," is a roly-poly, volatile, sharp-tongued onetime Philadelphia lawyer who would rather not be reminded that he looks like Herbert Hoover when he smiles. Boardman Smith knows how workers feel because his father was once a steel-worker and he himself worked in the mills to earn his way through Coraopolis, Pa. high school. As a lawyer, he specialized in labor and immigration cases.

Edwin Seymour Smith, 45, no kin to Donald Wakefield, has an even more extensive Labor background. After Harvard and a stretch of reporting for the Springfield Republican and Hartford Times, he became employment manager of Boston's famed Filene Department Store and personal assistant to Board Chairman Abraham Lincoln Filene. In 1931 he was appointed Massachusetts' Commissioner of Labor & Industries, left that job to join the old NRA Labor Board. Ruddy-faced, blue-eyed, a snappy dresser given to loud neckties, he reads omnivorously, has written several economic treatises, relaxes week ends on his farm in Loudoun County, Va.

NLRB's non-Smith and chairman is Joseph Warren Madden, a quiet, friendly, good-humored scholar, greying at 47, who has been law professor at Cornell, Stanford, Chicago, Oklahoma, Ohio State, West Virginia and Pittsburgh universities. No recluse, he served in Pittsburgh on an NRA regional labor board, a special committee to arbitrate a streetcar strike, a Governor's commission on special policing in industry, a federation of social agencies, a housing association. For fun he leads an orchestra composed of his three sons and two daughters, plays tennis with his sons and baseball with the NLRB employes team, digs in his garden.

As he had done every Monday morning for weeks past, Chairman Madden began last week by going not to his small green-&-cream office in the Denrike Building, but across town to the great dead splendor of the Supreme Court temple. Like almost everyone else, he firmly expected to hear the Court announce that his work in Washington was over. When he heard the words which meant that his real job was only just beginning, he sped to his office, called the second press conference of his Washington career. "This," he exulted, "means the solution of industrial peace!"

For the rest of the week NLRB headquarters was the liveliest spot in Washington. Few new Labor cases turned up, for both workers and employers were catching their breath, taking their bearings in the new industrial scene. But messenger boys streamed in with telegrams of congratulation. As always when a New Deal agency is assured of permanence, lawyers, clerks, secretaries and publicity men from less secure Government departments thronged clamoring for jobs. All week long the Board's big tousle-haired publicity man, Malcolm ("Mike") Ross, sat glued to a telephone, answering questions from the suddenly interested press. And from big and little industrialists in every corner of the land poured an avalanche of queries as to just what was expected of them under the "new" law of the land.

Neither in Washington nor in NLRB's 21 regional offices could snap judgments be had on all possible situations which might arise. The Act's terms and the Board's procedure were clear. Every employer engaged in interstate commerce is now compelled to let his employes organize without hindrance, to bargain collectively with the organization chosen by an employe majority. Any worker who believes that his employer is balking at these terms may appeal to the Board for redress--the case passing through a regional director for investigation, to a hearing by a Board-appointed trial examiner, to adjudication by the Board, and finally--if the employer refuses to accept the Board decision--to trial in a U. S. Circuit Court. But within that broad theoretical framework lies room for 1,001 problems and squabbles. Many of them were left unresolved by the Court's decisions, many by the Board's inexperience. Even with 18 months and 2,072 cases behind it, NLRB has yet to learn all the answers.

By the Wagner Act, an employer must bargain exclusively with the union chosen by a majority of his employes; in case of dispute, the Board will hold an election. Left to Board decision is the "appropriate unit" to be polled--craft, plant or industry. That plops the Board squarely in the middle of the bitterest Labor fight in U. S. history--A. F. of L. craft unionism v. C. I. O. industrial unionism. Suppose the board decides to poll a great industrial plant, and an old, established craft union proves to be a minority? Will the Board then deny it all representation? And if it does, will the Supreme Court sustain that decision?

Suppose the Board polls a plant of 5,000 workers and 3,000 vote for no union at all?

Suppose an employer consents to go through the motions of collective bargaining, but says No to every union proposal and offers no counter-terms of his own?

Suppose an employer is entirely willing to engage in genuine collective bargaining but cannot determine which of two quarreling factions in his employ represents a majority of his employes? Can he appeal to the Board for a settlement? When New York's Senator Wagner, the author of the Act, asserted last week that employers could appeal, he was promptly contradicted by Senator Vandenberg. Simultaneously an employer moved to put the question to a test. In Manhattan, aboard the International Mercantile Marine's S. S. President Roosevelt, some members of International Seamen's Union's "rank & file" insurgent wing sat down in protest against employment of members of the ruling faction. The sit-down spread to two other I. M. M. ships, threatened to tie up the entire fleet. I. M. M. President John Franklin appealed to NLRB's regional director in Manhattan, Elinore M. Herrick. Without quibbling about technicalities, Mrs. Herrick called a conference, patched up a truce, arranged to hold an employe election.

After a lifetime of antiunionism climaxed last fortnight when he declared that he would never recognize any union, Henry Ford acknowledged last week's Supreme Court decisions by announcing mildly that his men had ''always been free to join anything" and simply smiled when asked if he ever expected to sit across a conference table from John L. Lewis. But nobody expected Mr. Ford to submit lying down when United Automobile Workers' rambunctious President Homer Martin threatened at week's end to file charges against him with NLRB, blustered that the Union would have him "on the run" within three days.

It was understandable that Chairman Madden, in the first flush of victory after his long judicial siege, should cry that triumph in all five of his test cases meant industrial peace. Almost 50% of last year's strikes were efforts to win collective bargaining privileges. But that left more than 1,000 strikes for higher pay, fewer hours, better working conditions. Some day Capital and Labor may pull the cart of Industry smoothly together, but not until there has been many a balk, many a runaway by both employers and employes yet unschooled in the double-harness technique of collective bargaining.

The checkrein was tightest on Capital last week, and on all sides rose the cry that Labor should now accept responsibilities commensurate with its new privileges. If workers were to have a Government-enforced right to bargain collectively, employers demanded some assurance that they would stick to their bargains, not go plunging off in "unauthorized" strikes such as followed signing of the General Motors- U. A. W. agreement. Calling a conference of industrialists and Labor leaders for this week "to determine the wisest procedures and safeguards" for the "stabilization of industrial relations under collective bargaining," Secretary of Labor Perkins conceded that the question of Labor Responsibility would be high on the meeting's agenda.

Unions, Inc. Oftenest heard and least intelligibly debated of proposals for Labor Responsibility is that unions should be compelled to incorporate. Labor leaders, all dead set against it, commonly content themselves with declaring that anyone who suggests such a thing wants not to sober unions but to destroy them. Last week John L. Lewis allowed himself to be pinned down to the objection that unfriendly employers might cause an incorporated union to be infiltrated with agents provocateurs, who would instigate or perform unlawful acts for which the union would be held responsible. On the affirmative side, it is generally argued that since most businesses are incorporated, unions should be, too. Understandable to laymen is the contention that union officials no less than corporation officials should be required to make a public accounting of funds. But so vaguely defined are the legal liabilities which a union would assume by incorporation that last week in Manhattan crack Labor Lawyer Morris Ernst could declare: "I have yet to hear specifically what legal rights employers want against unions that they do not have today."

Working Models. Impartial students of mechanisms for creating industrial order point oftenest to two working models, one U. S., the other British. The U. S. Railway Labor Act, upheld by the Supreme Court last month (TIME, April 5), provides a National Railroad Adjustment Board and a National Mediation Board to which disputes may be taken. What happens if a settlement is still not reached was demonstrated last week when 8,500 Southern Pacific members of the Brotherhoods of Trainmen & Firemen threatened to strike because the railroad "favored" the Brotherhoods of Engineers & Conductors. By settled procedure President Roosevelt promptly declared an emergency, appointed a special mediation board which will have 30 days to make its findings, after which parties to the dispute must sit tight for another 30 days of consideration.

In Britain, which has had far longer experience with labor organization than the U. S., unions voluntarily register with a Government agency, furnish statistics on membership and finances. Arbitration of labor disputes through an elaborate machine of standing committees, trade boards, industrial courts and Royal Commissions, is also voluntary. But after the great General Strike of 1926, Britain passed a Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act designed to keep its unions forcibly under control. Sympathetic strikes intended to coerce the Government by causing serious public distress are outlawed. And union officials are held legally responsible if such strikes occur.

School Strategy. Unless the Sit-Down should scare U. S. lawmakers as badly as the General Strike scared Britain's, the prospect of any such halter being put on politically potent U. S. Labor seemed remote indeed last week. Meantime genuine Democrats could put their faith in the U. S. workingman's good sense and educability.

Faced with unruly pupils, a young prep school teacher is apt to resort to threats and harsh penalties. But if he takes his problem to a wise headmaster he will probably be counseled to try patience and individual suasion instead. Last week just such a problem of discipline faced John L. Lewis. Vastly alarmed has been the nation by the headstrong Sit-Down tactics of his automobile unionists, but they are raw freshmen in the school of unionism. Such long-established unions as the railroad brotherhoods and Leader Lewis' own United Mine Workers have proved that in time, with responsible leadership, workers learn to abide by the rules, prefer conference tables to picket lines. Last week John Lewis asked the public to be patient while his young lieutenants and followers acquire maturity. "After the high tension of the past six months," said he, "the time has come for cooling off."

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