UAW'S DEBT TO GENERAL MOTORS

...OS% but yes...

...Anderson, Wilson, Sloan (but you haven't seen his name in the papers) and the du Ponts overplayed their hands...

...Prosperity postponed...

...It insisted—and backed its insistence with detailed arithmetic—that GM could meet the wage demands, maintain its pre-war profit level, and reduce the price of its cars...

...Wartime profiteering carried over into the peace...

...Submitting superficially to the terms of the Wagner Act, it made a couple of "counter-offers" so absurd that even the press did not take them too seriously, and its representatives sat around a table a few times with the union's negotiators...

...Republicans and Democrats might differ over Pearl Harbor or the Full Employment Bill, but there was something very close to bi-Party agreement on the urgent need to curb high-stepping labor...

...Anderson, Mr...

...Even the press could not quite explain away or tone down the arrogant public-be-damned attitude of General Motors...

...AND it worked...

...I wonder if it is—for long...

...the law can be changed...

...For that position was based on two tenets, both of which appeal strongly to the American sense of fair play...

...No headlines told what a tiny fraction of a percentage of total work-days were lost...

...In fact, on this last point, the union went still farther...

...Reconversion about to be throttled for the selfish interests of one self-seeking group...

...Millions of citizens denied the new cars they badly needed...

...Sloan (quit skulking back there, old man, come out and take a bow), and the duPonts...

...For a time, the press played it to the limit...

...With the end of the war, the country's mood became one of Back to Normalcy...

...WHEN this farcical form of bargaining inevitably stalled, the union offered to arbitrate if the company would open its books to impartial arbitrators...

...There is something in the air that does not bode too well for the General Motors Corporation...

...Newspapers pounced on irate quotes from the boys in the foxholes who had been force-fed anti-union distortions by the press wire services and who naturally reacted as the press hoped and planned...

...Certainly it is asking for trouble...

...Wartime wages were pictured as practically a form of profiteering...

...What more to the taste of the union-wrecking crew...

...Alfred P. Sloan, GM board chairman (remember Alf, retiring but far from retired...

...I mean it...

...the company refused unless the union would lower its wage demands—a flagrant violation of the Wagner Act which the union immediately carried to the NLRB...

...As most of the nation interpreted that idea, it meant Back to Sub-normalcy for labor...

...The set-up was perfect...

...As I write, the union has gladly submitted its case to Federal conciliators...

...Strikes were blown up in headlines out of all proportion to their numbers or importance...

...no closed shop stuff, no "enforced tribute to labor barons," for them...

...WHAT happened was that Messrs...

...the company refused...

...the Messrs...

...But even though GM representatives will undoubtedly lag into Washington before this appears in print, I daresay they will not budge from the position they have truculently held from the start that prices and profits are none of the union's blankety-blank business and none of the public's blankety-blank business either...

...Certainly some members of Congress are going to wonder, if GM intransigence prolongs the strike, whether that intransigence should be rewarded by the payment of Federal millions, in refunded excess profit taxes, next year...

...CERTAINLY some taxpayers are going to remember that GM grew fat through four war years on public funds...

...Congress was in an ugly anti-union frame of mind...

...Even the press could not quite distort into unreason the cool logic and the dumbfounding fairness of the UAW position...

...No indeed, my unseen audience, the tongue is not in the cheek...

...Then suddenly the stories began to shift from the right-hand column to the left-hand column of front pages, and then from front pages to pages 3 or S3...

...there are more taxpayers than stockholders...

...What happened...

...Everyone knew from the start that they were backed by the threat of a major strike...

...Nobody in years has done so much so fast for labor as they...

...Certainly some members of Congress are going to wonder whether our largest industrial corporation should remain so arrogantly immune as it claims to be from investigation and control in behalf of the national good...

...After the strike, which the company's attitude had actively invited, got going, the union asked to resume negotiations...

...Millions more, on the periphery of the auto industry, thrown involuntarily out of work...

...Characteristic of the "good faith" of GM—which the law requires in such bargaining—was the remark (reported in Time) of Harry Coen, GM's director of labor relations, when Reuther was explaining the union's view that higher wages would benefit the whole economy: "You are wasting your time and our time with all this crap...

...Wilson, Mr...

...Those demands—for a 30 per cent increase in hourly wages—looked awfully big, perhaps for horse-trading purposes...

...There is something in Lincoln about fooling the people...

...Second—and even more rare and more significant —it specifically disclaimed any wish to reap selfish benefits at the expense of other groups...

...and Mes-dames du Pont, who own huge chunks of GM stock—if all these folk are not in the secret pay of the United Automobile Workers or the CIO or the labor movement in general, they ought to be...

...And certainly somebody is going to remind GM that even in peacetime it lives on government subsidies...

...that except for the blankety-blank Wagner Act and the moribund OP A, General Motors is blankety-well going to run its own affairs without outside inquiry or interference...

...Returning servicemen, well prompted at home as they'd been abroad, were ready to fight the unioneers for jobs...

...For the nation's predominantly and bitterly anti-union press had done a swell job of sabotage on the unions during the war...

...The economy disrupted...

...First, the union was willing and even eager to carry on all negotiations in the open, with press or public present to judge its sincerity and the merits of its case...

...But the GM men sat with their feet on the table reading newspapers while the UAW men talked...

...As recently as a few weeks ago, the nation as a whole was hostile to labor...

...Meanwhile, I think Walter Reuther and his boys should give a rousing vote of thanks to those Canutes of cannibalistic capitalism, Mr...

...Into this antagonistic national atmosphere, the UAW, sparked by its dynamic young vice-president, Walter Reuther, tossed its wage demands...

...Bear with me while I try to tell it in ABC's...

...In stark contrast was the company's stand: It refused to negotiate in the open, preferring to "bargain" behind closed doors...

...Corporate profits, piling high in "reserves," somehow escaped mention...

...the reluctant company has at least temporarily refused...

...it offered to scale down its wage demands if the company could prove, with figures from company books, that those demands could not be met without either charging higher prices for cars or else cutting profits below pre-war levels...

...Who builds and maintains, at aeostof bfliftougk the roads on which Buicks and CherosoletS and Qtdamaft biles run and without which no Bofcfcs or Cb&vsoJeta eg Oldsmobiles eould be soidt 4 There is something in the Bible about "pride" $ml£ "a haughty spirit" and what happens after...