Strikes Are Up

The farther the nation got beyond V-E day the more strikes there were. One day last week upwards of 100,000 workers were out. The Labor Department's Conciliation Service reported that the daily average of strikes had risen from 20 before V-E day to about 40.

P: In St. Louis, 2,700 workers at a fuse plant refused to cross a picket line set up by 150 men with a contract grievance.

P: In Detroit, a jurisdictional flare-up affecting 900 men closed the Packard Motor Car Co. to 21,000 workers. At an aircraft supply plant, 3,500 walked out because there was no meat in their lunch sandwiches. (Detroit's entire meat supply was threatened by a strike in slaughterhouses.)

P: In Akron's rubber plants, 16,700 workers were out. In the Pittsburgh area. Toledo and a half-dozen other places, the glass industry counted 15,000 workers out.

P: In Chicago's second truck drivers' strike in a month the U.S. Army stepped in, swiftly deployed more than 10,000 troops from eastern and western camps to run the trucks. (Some of the soldiers were just back from duty in the Pacific.)

There was no clear pattern to the disputes. Many of the strike reasons were trivial. The Conciliation Service listed some of them: 1) paychecks arrived late;

2) lunchtime checker games prohibited;

3) war nerves; 4) hot weather.

These were superficial reasons. There were more basic causes of the strikes and of others sure to come. Chief one was labor's fear that, with the end of the war and the reduction in overtime, their take-home pay will be cut. Others: jurisdictional disputes, cutbacks, dissatisfaction with WLB dawdling.

Wetting his finger to the wind, Economic Stabilizer William H. Davis urged an upward revision in the basic minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act: a flat 50-c--an-hour for all industries, and minimums up to 65-c- for specialized work. Meanwhile War Mobilizer Fred C. Vinson, ready to release a second report on the nation's half-war, half-peace economy, called it back for revision of recommendations on pay.

One fact was clear: even before V-J day, labor's wartime "no-strike pledge" had become increasingly meaningless to labor's rank & file.

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