Begging & Pleading

Across the U.S., from Montauk Point to Malibu Beach, the tide of labor unrest seethed angrily. In oil, automobiles, coal, lumber, textiles and many another industry, there were strikes, shutdowns, and threats of strikes. At one time last week 420,000 workers were idle. While many an industrial plant ran at less than full power because it could not staff its machinery, the first blows of violence rose ominously.

In Washington, where the Administration was frantically trying to catch up with the facts of peacetime life, worried Labor Secretary Lew Schwellenbach reflected the Government's confusion. To labor and management representatives from the strike-ridden oil industry he said: "The Government, representing 30,000,000 people, and particularly representing the young men we have overseas, is here begging and pleading with you that you get together." The Government, with the war over, was reluctant to exercise its only positive power--seizure and operation of struck plants. Thus Lew Schwellenbach was left with the slender tools of conciliation and persuasion; at week's end the tools were not doing the job. Labor troubles were breaking down the industrial machine more ominously than they had done since the sitdown strikes of 1937.

Vital Spot. In dealing personally with the oil strike, Lew Schwellenbach was trying to meet the most immediate of many dangers. Already, 35,000 refinery workers were out in seven states; another 250,000 threatened to walk out. Gasoline supplies were running low in many states.

The Army & Navy warned that fuel shortages would interfere with demobilization. Said Lew Schwellenbach: "The very mechanics of operation of our economy are being threatened."

Vital Threat. In Detroit, the wildcat strike at the Kelsey-Hayes Wheel Co. still kept 50,000 Ford workers from their jobs. One night last week the United Automobile Workers' President R. J. Thomas begged and pleaded with the un ruly strikers to go back to work. They drowned him out with boos. The Kelsey-Hayes workers had taken matters into their own hands; neither Thomas nor, apparently, any other top U.A.W. official could get them back.

And Detroit's worst problem lay ahead. Last week the National Labor Relations Board set strike votes for Oct. 24 and Oct. 25 for 325,000 General Motors employes and 120,000 workers in Chrysler plants. Next, a similar voting date would be set for the 200,000 employes of the Ford Co. The union strategy, if its demands are not met: to strike one company at a time, let the others stay in operation, thus knock off the 'opposition one at a time.

In many another spot throughout the nation, strikes flared, died down, or kept plants and industries in expensive idleness:

P: In Lancaster, Pa., after clashes with club-swinging police, employes of the Conestoga Transportation Co. ended a strike that had tied up bus-trolley service for 26 days.

P: In the Pacific Northwest, 60,000 A.F. of L. lumber workers were out.

P: In the Paterson (N.J.) area, 6,000 textile workers closed 70 plants; 62,000 textile workers were out in nine states.

P: In Camden, N.J., 4,000 workers staged a sitdown strike at the New York Ship building Corp., went back to work when the U.S. Navy stepped in.

P: In New York, 1,500 employes, including nurses, voted to strike in four Manhattan and Brooklyn hospitals.

And Now--John L. By week's end, John L. Lewis and his United Mine Workers had moved into the show. A strike of foremen and supervisors had already closed 127 soft coal pits in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio, throwing 53,546 out of work. John Lewis demanded that the operators come to Washington to talk it over; the operators balked, planned a last-ditch fight. The miners' boss rumbled about "insolence," implied that a general strike of 450,000 miners might be called.

Another explosive situation cropped up when the National Federation of Telephone Workers planned a general, four-hours "stoppage" of 200,000 operators and others to protest an NLRB ruling. The plan: to hold an afternoon mass meeting--which would throw the nation's telephone system into chaos, except for local dial calls.

Altogether, in the seven weeks since V-J day, there had been 23 major strikes; nearly 400 applications for strike votes had been filed with NLRB. And the end was not in sight; in fact, it looked more like a beginning.

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