Strikes-of-the-Week

The ferment of Labor activity which, with the President fishing and Congress loafing, continued to make most national news, reached a pipsqueak peak last week in Manhattan when, in effect, Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor went on strike. Actual strikers were most of the 135 employes of Fleischer Studios Inc., producers of Boop, Popeye and other animated cartoons. Shouldering placards displaying the cartoon characters and such legends as "We can't get much spinach on salaries as low as $15," they blocked the sidewalk in front of the Studio's building in Times Square, scuffled with police and non-strikers, got 14 of themselves arrested.

Meantime across the continent in Hollywood a shutdown of the nation's major cinema studios remained all week in prospect as 6,000 painters, make-up men & scenic artists and members of eight other crafts, allied in Federated Motion Picture Crafts, continued on strike for union recognition and closed shops (TIME, May 10). With the help of strikebreakers, cameras ground away as usual, but over Hollywood hung the ominous air of strike-torn Detroit. Strikers, working in three shifts of 1,000 pickets each, shuffled around the studios, scuffled with non-strikers, tried to intimidate actors and others passing through the picket lines by snapping their photographs for a "scabs' gallery." Worst violence occurred when a gang of 50 men with hammers and clubs raided headquarters of the International Alliance of Theatrical & Stage Employes, Hollywood's No. 1 labor group, which actively opposed the strike. After the battle, five I. A. T. S. E. men were carted off to hospital with cuts, bruises, broken bones. When the striking unions, all affiliated with American Federation of Labor, protested against the strikebreaking activities of I. A. T. S. E., also an A. F. of L. member, and demanded nation-wide picketing and boycott of cinema theatres, A. F. of L. President William Green replied that the strike was "not authorized." Ever alert to win converts, John L. Lewis promised the strikers the full support of his C. I. O.

One of the busiest men in Hollywood last week was James ("Jimmy") Cagney, No. 1 portrayer of cinema toughs. The sympathy for the underdog which Actor Cagney developed in his youth on Manhattan's East Side was given point and direction by the late, crusading Lincoln Steffens. Long famed as one of Hollywood's brightest Pinks, Jimmy Cagney's public deeds have been nothing more daring than an occasional contribution to strikers and active leadership in the Screen Actors' Guild. But last week he and such other notably social-conscious cinemactors as Fredric March, Chester Morris, Franchot Tone, Joan Crawford, Jean Muir and Edward Arnold were debating something really big--a strike of the Guild which would shut every film studio down tight. While a committee headed by President Robert Montgomery negotiated the Guild's demands with representatives of producers, a hundred or more stars gathered nightly at the homes of March, Morris and Cagney to talk strike. Asking nothing for themselves, the Guild's 1,100 high-salaried contract players were out to improve the lot of their 4,500 low-paid associates--extras and bit-players getting less than $250 per week. For them it demanded a union shop, steadier work and better working conditions, minimum pay upped from a current low of $3.20, abolition of the Call Bureau.*

Every night producers and Guild officers talked until 2 or 3 a. m. While her husband, Franchot Tone, backed up President Montgomery with telling arguments, Second Vice President Joan Crawford knitted away like a Madam Defarge, occasionally stiffening the men's backbones with her cry: "We strike!" Meantime the Guild's senior members were being polled, voting overwhelmingly for a strike if negotiations broke down. In prospect was the extraordinary spectacle of the cinema's top celebrities marching in picket lines outside studios and theatres. Stuntmen and cowboy actors prepared to organize a troop of 300 horsemen for picketing, or for charges on producers if required.

At week's end negotiations were still deadlocked when an I.A.T.S.E. official telephoned the Guild's Founder-Secretary Kenneth Thomson, promised to call a sympathetic walkout of his 30,000 members if the Guild struck. At that, the producers' representatives knuckled under. On behalf of RKO, Paramount, MGM, Columbia, Universal and Twentieth Century-Fox, Twentieth Century's Chairman Joseph M. Schenck and MGM's Vice President Louis B. Mayer squeezed their signatures at the bottom of an agreement to the Guild's demands, scribbled on a sheet of foolscap. Prime points were granting of a Guild shop (virtually closed shop), extras' pay upped 10% with a null minimum, overtime pay for players in the lower brackets, revision of the Call Bureau.

That evening some 4,000 grimly serious actors, not yet informed of the agreement, swarmed to Hollywood's barnlike American Legion Stadium with minds made up about how to mark the strike ballots they were handed at the door. Loud were the cheers when President Montgomery, dog-tired but icy-cool, announced the settlement. Since formal contracts had yet to be signed, and other producers, notably Warner Brothers, had yet to be brought to terms, a strike vote was taken. Bandy-legged Boris Karloff hustled around with a ballot box which he somehow managed to make suggest an infernal machine. The vote was for a strike against any producer who refused to sign a Guild contract. But no one expected that to happen.

"We've been sold down the river," cried the head of Federated Motion Picture Crafts, his hopes of a sympathetic Guild strike crushed. "The working people of this country made these stars. And we will break them."

P: Declaring himself tired of C. I. O. attempts to organize his workers, the general manager of Apex Hosiery Co., Philadelphia's biggest non-union hosiery mill, shut down his plant one day at noon, locking out 2,500 employes. Massing outside, they were joined by some 10,000 sympathetic workers from other mills. For a while the ugly-tempered crowd contented itself with milling, muttering, shying an occasional stone through plant windows. Suddenly some 300 men detached themselves from the main body and, while the mob set up a terrifying roar, battered their way through a line of 100 policemen, stormed through doors and windows, beat down the guards inside, commenced a Sit-Down. While 40 battlers licked their wounds, company officials promptly commenced negotiations with C. I. O.'s American Federation of Hosiery Workers.

P: In Manhattan the rank & file insurgents of A. F. of L.'s International Seamen's Union who staged the "unauthorized" maritime strike in Atlantic and Gulf ports last autumn (TIME, Nov. 9 et seq.) finally made a clean break with their old leaders, set up a new National Maritime Union claiming 28,000 members. Announced were plans to join C. I. O., to demand National Labor Relations Board elections to decide whether the old union or the new should have exclusive bargaining rights.

Also in Manhattan, continuing a national trend, 7,000 members of the Transport Workers' Union voted to desert A. F. of L., join C. I. O.

P: In Kankakee, Ill., Circuit Judge W. R. Hunter asked six applicants for citizenship if they approved the Sit-Down. Luckily, all said "No," for the Judge announced that he would have denied their applications if they had commended that "form of anarchy."

P: In Lewiston, Me. about 700 employes of three shoe factories agreed to end their six-week strike, called by C. I. O.'s United Shoe Workers of America, and let a N. L. R. B. election decide the issue of their representation. Strikes in 16 other Lewiston and Auburn shoe plants dragged on, with National Guardsmen patrolling the area where strikers rioted last fortnight after State Supreme Judicial Court Justice Harry Manser had issued an injunction outlawing the strike on the ground that the union had no right to call it until it first determined by N. L. R. B. election that it had a majority of em-ployes (TIME, May 3). Tried before Judge Manser in Lewiston last week on a charge of having continued to encourage the strike despite the injunction. Powers Hapgood, C. I. O. secretary for New England, and five other C. I. O. leaders were found guilty, given six-month jail sentences.

P: Socialist Mayor Jasper McLevy of Bridgeport, Conn, furnished police protection to strikebreakers hired when the city's unionized garbage collectors struck after one of their fellows had been dismissed on a charge of insulting a housewife.

*Maintained for the hiring of everyone from $25-per-day bit-players up to featured performers, the Call Bureau permits a producer to take a 24-hr, option on the services of any actor whom he is considering for a part. Actors complain because the options may be renewed indefinitely by an undecided producer, thus keeping them from taking an immediate job at another studio.

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