Industrial Democracy

Among all the labor bigwigs who attended the C.I.O. convention this month in Boston, no man had more unpleasant news on his mind than Left Wing Communist-inclined Reid Robinson, president of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. Coming up to Boston for a love feast with Phil Murray and the boys he ended up taking a trip across the continent in a U.S. Army bomber trying to quell mutiny among his own miners.

Cause of the hurried trip was the flat refusal of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local No. 1 at Butte, Mont, to allow Negro workers down the shafts of Anaconda Copper. This was in grim defiance of C.I.O.'s strong pro-Negro policies. It was also in defiance of the U.S. Army, and of an Administration patently striving to promote amicable Negro-white relations among the labor forces of this country.

The rumpus at Butte goes back to last month when the Army furloughed 4,000 soldier miners in an effort to ease the terrific shortage of labor in the nonferrous mines. In Utah a few of the new recruits were turned down because of physical disabilities which the Army had passed but which would not stand up in the face of stiff health requirements of the Utah mines. But to Butte were assigned 30-odd physically healthy furloughed Negro soldiers who had only to meet the requirements of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Local No. 1--so old it is known as the "mother local"--headed by an oldtime, plain-spoken Irish miner, Jim Byrne.

Local No. 1's requirements proved stiffer than the army had expected. When the first 14 Negroes appeared at the pit, 100 miners on the night shift walked out but were urged back to work by the management. Subsequently the whole local refused to work as long as a single Negro was below ground. It was at that point that Mr. Robinson was called from Boston, arrived in Butte for a Sunday meeting held in the Fox Theater. Solemnly 1,700 miners listened to telegrams from Phil Murray, Paul McNutt, General Brehon Somervell. Solemnly they voted to stick by their guns.

This week the Anaconda copper mines were still open, though not operating at full capacity for want of labor. The Negroes were still in Butte, but all above ground. The C.I.O., the Army and the Administration were sputtering. Anaconda, for once no one's whipping boy, could say with Daniel M. Kelly, mine manager: "We're just on the sidelines in all this show." Said Mr. Byrne of Local No. 1: "We're going on the theory that this is still a democracy."

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