Wrong Number?

At 8 o'clock one morning last week, 20,000 Western Electric installation men tore up their picket signs and went back to work for an 11 1/2-c- hourly raise. The six-week-old telephone strike, dead in spirit since the operators capitulated three weeks ago, was also dead in fact.

Promptly, the disillusioned affiliates of the National Federation of Telephone Workers began preparing for N.F.T.W.'s own funeral. From the start of the strike they had realized that N.F.T.W., unaffiliated with either C.I.O. or A.F.L., was too weak to buck the concerted power of A.T. & T. Now it was so battered it hardly seemed worth reviving. In Manhattan, the executive board of the long lines operators, by unanimous vote, recommended secession from the N.F.T.W. and the organization of a new union within the C.I.O.

In Illinois, 7,000 telephone workers followed suit, but tossed in their lot with the A.F.L. At Atlantic City, representatives of 100,000 other telephone employees met with C.I.O. big shots, arranged for a conference in Philadelphia this week to kick off a full-scale organizing drive. Said long lines President John Moran: "We can't continue to exist as an isolated group and remain isolated from other segments of organized labor."

To N.F.T.W. President Joe Beirne, the breakup was the end of a dream to weld his loose confederation into a single, tight union at the Miami convention next month. It also meant the beginning of a jurisdictional tug-of-war between A.F.L. and C.I.O. for possession of N.F.T.W.'s seceding affiliates. For A.T. & T., the call that broke N.F.T.W. might well prove to be a wrong number.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.