Quickies Quenched?

Along the trail of trouble that followed San Francisco's non-union "hot car" of Woolworth school supplies (TIME, Aug. 29), owners of 121 closed warehouses and 35 open but strike-crippled department stores still held out for concessions in new labor contracts, fighting C. I. O. warehousemen and A. F. of L. clerks to a standstill. But San Franciscans were cheered last week by more significant news: Harry Bridges' C. I. O. longshoremen and Pacific Coast shipping line operators at last agreed, subject to rank-and-file approval, to sign contracts promising peace on the water front for a year.

Because without the longshoremen no general strike comparable to San Francisco's War of 1934 can break out, this was good news at the Golden Gate, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, many a lesser Pacific port. Despite stiffened employer resistance and a labor position weakened by inter-union feuds, longshoremen were not quite willing to grant the outright guarantee against outlaw "quickies" which President Almon Roth of the Pacific Coast Waterfront Employers Association originally demanded. Instead the Bridges union agreed to punish contract violators by suspension or expulsion, to put disputed cases up to five permanent arbitrators, in no event to stop work while the new peace machinery functions. If, as Almon Roth publicly hopes, seagoing unions give similar assurance, the West Coast may be in for an era of unaccustomed labor tranquillity.

Last weekend Mr. Bridges, newly chastened by the courts (see p. 12), returned to the stalled warehouse negotiations, wrote to employers: "Let's take the starch out of our necks and sit down around the conference table." President James Reed of the Association of Distributors agreed.

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