Hog Butchers for the World

With his convex profile and his hornrimmed glasses, President Lewis J. Clark of the C.I.O. United Packinghouse Workers looks like the Caspar Milquetoast of U.S. labor. With his mere 200,000 members, many pulling at cross-purposes, he holds one of the shakiest of all union leaderships.

Yet it remained for mild, uncertain Lewis Clark to toss the year's toughest talk into the labor debate. When the Government seized the packing plants last week, to end a nine-day-old strike, Lewis Clark shouted: "A complete double cross. . . . The President of the U.S. has engaged in a strikebreaking action, the sole effect of which can be to play into the hands of the packers."

For three tense days, Lewis Clark insisted that his workers would not go back. Here was a U.S. labor leader openly defying Government seizure; nobody quite knew what to do about rambunctious Mr. Clark. Then he relented. He watched the rival A.F. of L. union's President Earl Jimerson give in happily to the back-to-work order. He extracted the promise of help toward wage boosts from Agriculture Secretary Clinton Anderson and conferred with C.I.O. President Phil Murray (who apparently extracted a few promises of his own).

This week Lewis Clark led his men back to work. Housewives heaved a sigh of relief. So did farmers--the hog run, stopped at its peak, had backed up all over the Midwest, and grain for feeding was running low. So, too, did Lewis Clark's union.

Sired by Failure. Poor, proud, tough and relatively small, the packinghouse union was born in 1937 of the repeated failures of the A.F. of L. and independent unions to wring concessions from the "Big Four" packers (Swift, Armour, Cudahy & Wilson). At the core of its membership are Negro/Irish, Slav and Mexican knockers, hog-splitters, blood-catchers and miscellaneous workers who do the hard, dangerous, foul-smelling labor in the huge packing plants.

At the top sit President Clark, an ex-hog butcher, and his conservative fellow officers. They try to do the will of their tumultuous rank-&-file, keep the union's neck in and hold down its strong left wing (led by jut-jawed Director Herbert March of District 1), all at the same time.

Heartland of U.P.W.A. is Chicago's smoky, sprawling, brawling "back-of-the-yards" district. There, in ugly tenements filled with the odors of decay and burning hair, some 100,000 of the meatworkers live. Two forces unite them: the packinghouses, and the Catholic Church.

In 1939, when racial antagonisms made the district doubly grim, Chicago's shrewd, liberal Auxiliary Bishop Bernard J. Sheil marshaled his stockyard priests to help a new-established Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council fight them down. Soon Bishop Sheil and his aides had playgrounds and young people's clubs going in place of gang fights. The Catholic Church now plays a major role in determining the sentiment of the district--the factor which, in the long run, may well determine the outcome of the dispute. But the Church has rivals: last week, while Catholic priests tramped with the U.P.W.A. pickets, a trailer from Communist Party headquarters fed the strikers coffee, doughnuts and copies of the Daily Worker.

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