Clean Union

One morning last week 356 delegates to "Homer Martin's convention" in Detroit voted their United Automobile Workers of America out of C. I. O., which had already booted them out. That afternoon they negligently passed the same resolution all over again, cheering lustily and voting to wire a copy to John Llewellyn Lewis.

Thus was established what newly elected President Homer Martin called "a democratic, autonomous, clean union." His inference was that the other part of the United Automobile Workers of America which in the recent split (TIME, Feb. 6) remained with C. I. 0. has none of these qualities, although it undoubtedly has a clear majority of organized autoworkers.

Homer Martin's one chance of survival outside both C. I. 0. and A. F. of L. is to sell his wobbly minority to automakers who, now that they must have some union, ask nothing more than an orderly one. For selling talk, Mr. Martin had his delegates pledge themselves to observe their contracts, keep out Communists, Nazis and Fascists, and debar all such gentry from office. In doing so Homer Martin alienated radicals who have stood loyally by him and supplied the bulk of his administrative brains.

Followers of Communist Oppositionist Jay Lovestone yelped that they had been sold out to the most reactionary elements in the union, threatened to desert en masse. Meantime Henry Ford's unionized competitors resigned themselves to battle not with a union but between two unions claiming the same name, same contracts, same prerogatives under the Wagner Act.

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