"Talk & Understand"

The Colorado Fuel and Iron Corp once Rockefeller-controlled, has repeatedly made U.S. labor history. The blackest page was the "Ludlow Massacre" in 1914 when company police and state militia set fare to a tent city of striking workers killing 33. The nationwide uproar forced the company to change its labor policy set up a company union.

In 1941, the C.I.O. Steelworkers Union came in--after a two-year struggle--and in 1944 the Rockefellers sold out to Manhattan's Allen & Co., investment brokers. By 1946, C. F. & I. had a new president husky, Republic Steel-trained Carl Ward Meyers, himself the son of an Ohio steelworker. He thought that management and labor should "get together, study, talk and understand."

Throughout C. F. & I.'s plants last week as the workers picked up their copies of the company's newspaper, the Blast, they blinked at his latest example of understanding. The Blast looked more like a union handout than a company house-organ. On the front page was a play-by-play factual account of the convention of District 38 of the steelworkers. The issue carried pictures of the delegates and articles of union interest written by union members.

To provide this union coverage (and to wean his workers from the union press), Meyers had revamped the Blast's staff. As editor-in-chief he hired aggressive, 36-year-old Orville Weller, a Navy veteran, allowed Weller to hire a group of associate editors, mostly C.I.O. members. The Blast plans to keep on covering union affairs fully, with no editorial comment.

This calls for some pussyfooting. In its convention issue, for example, the Blast brushed off the issue of the day with a tactful: "The speaker touched upon one of the major convention topics--the Taft-Hartley Bill." However, such reticence pleases not only the management but also the union. It likes the coverage of union doings but does not want the paper to "tamper with union affairs."

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