IS LABOR UNPATRIOTIC?
Chamberlain, John
Is Labor Unpatriotic? By JOHN CHAMBERLAIN THERE is a dangerous anti-labor mood growing up in this country among groups that ought to know better. Fed by "anonymous" warnings from Washington,...
...But when the Army and the War Production Board have themselves ordered a cut-back in basic steel production, it is entirely understandable that the union should consider itself entitled to agitate against economic injustice even at the risk of cutting into the ingot production figures...
...In judging the War Labor Board's action "provocative," Phil Murray was quite within his rights...
...Certainly no union should interfere with critical war production even to prevent injustice...
...And the truth of the matter, as the "high official" should know, is that government itself has been utterly lawless in its handling of the railroad wage question, and thoroughly tactless in its attitude toward the demands of steel labor...
...When labor considers that it has been forced to use of the strike in wartime, it is pretty good evidence that the government itself is to blame...
...But just what did the Ohio work stoppage amount to...
...A prolonged interference with steel production could lose battles overseas...
...Then Judge Vinson, the economic "stabilizer," stepped in to set the award aside...
...Superficially considered, the lecture has its plausibility...
...They struck after U. S. Steel had announced the closing of the ingot-producing Penncoyd works near Philadelphia...
...If the "high official" who lectured the strikers was Gen...
...Marshall, then it is reasonable to assume that the right hand of the high command doesn't know what its left hand is doing...
...When the decision of a board of arbitration can be flouted, who can blame the railroad men for getting the idea that no machinery of justice is available to them...
...But he has messed up the problem of home front administration...
...Fed by "anonymous" warnings from Washington, people whose own patriotism cannot be questioned are coming to identify "labor" as an entity that is willing to play fast and loose with our chances for quick success in the battles overseas...
...In its decision to ban any retroactive application of a new steel contract to the moment when the old contracts ran out, the War Labor Board tacitly assured the steel companies that they had nothing to lose by stalling for months on negotiations with the union...
...Moreover, it is a "government of one man...
...The lecture from the unnamed "high official" would have it that the threatened railroad strike, and the work stoppage in Ohio steel towns, have been equivalent to a defeat for the American Army overseas...
...But consider the background of the Ohio strikes...
...I am not one who thinks that the war strikes are in order...
...I hope Phil Murray's union won't call a strike later on if the War Labor Board's decision goes against it...
...they had been told, in effect, that ingot, slab and bloom stocks were in excess of what the war fabricating plants could use...
...It is of the essence of justice that no court or board shall aid one litigant or contesting party as against another...
...In the case of the steel stoppages, the moral aspects of the situation are not so clear...
...Phil Murray and the steel workers had been informed that basic steel had been over-produced...
...In the case of the railroads a special board made a wage award...
...Home Front Mess President Roosevelt has been a good war leader in most respects...
...And who can blame them for threatening to counter lawless force majeure with the force majeure of a strike...
...This is a prime example of a "government of men, not of law...
...The Facts About Steel A completely magnanimous steel union might have been content with a protest to President Roosevelt...
...His method has been to appoint overlapping and competing boards and "czars," and the result is that no one knows whose word is final until the President himself, as Commander-in-Chief, has intervened to settle matters...
...The men struck after four Republic Steel plants had shut down furnaces...
...In other words, the War Production Board and the Army had made it perfectly plain to the steel workers that a short protest strike could have no ill effects on the delivery of armament to the soldiers...
...But the "high official" who has tried to make wartime strikes and stoppages synonymous with treason is guilty of some of the most one-sided thinking that has ever been put forward in the name of "truth...
Vol. 8 • January 1944 • No. 3
