LABOR'S DILEMMA

...He might have opposed the Truman plan on a number of valid counts, but the assumption that Truman had deliberately sold him down the river was not one of them...

...Moreover, Lewis seemed preparing to take his followers back into the AFL and, if he could, into the Republican Party...

...It did not offer them a way of retaining the present rules unchanged...

...Now it yelled that the Yanks must come home because the Russians wanted to be left alone to loot Eastern Europe and annex Northern China...

...FIRST of all, any legislation placing legal restrictions on labor's right to strike without notice is a serious limitation on the use of labor's ultimate weapon...

...Under the circumstances, this was about as fair a proposition as Truman could make...

...THIS was the situation...

...Yet Murray screamed as though Truman's advances constituted a threat of rape...

...The cooling-off features will assuage management and Congress and they are a necessary concomitant to fact-finding because it takes a little time to find facts...

...In fact, some critics of the President's bill, including many who are sympathetic with labor, contend that fact-findin'g in itself will prove inadequate and will inevitably lead to something more drastic because society will insist not only on control, but on effective control of labor...

...He would be ready to jeer at any open alliance between Murray and the President to foist controls on labor, no matter how gentle the controls...

...General Motors had been answering that its financial position was none of labor's business—that it had no intention of taking labor or the public into its bookkeeping confidence...

...He was winning public sympathy as no big strike before him had ever won it...

...Thereupon Philip Murray, president of the CIO, and as such, Reuther's boss, declared in a radio broadcast from Pittsburgh that Truman had sold labor down the river to the bosses in a cowardly fashion...

...But with it you must take cooling-off provisions similar to those provided for in the Railroad Labor Act...

...One can only guess at some of the reasons for Murray's alarm...

...Legislation would come...

...The question, then, is what kind of control and how much...

...In the argument on the point of economic information Reuther was beating the pants off General Motors...

...The President's proposal, even though it seems to provide a minimum of control, may be only the camel's nose under the tent...

...Following the break-down of the Labor-Management Conference, the President obviously had no choice'but to do something to get civilian production started or abdicate national leadership...

...If Congress attaches a lot of repressive amendments, I shall veto it...

...If Congress will accept this bill, which I am proposing, I will of course sign it...

...The probability was that any measure legislated in Congress would be tough enough to infuriate organized labor and to invite wholesale defiance of law...

...It is doubtful whether this argument weighed very heavily with Murray, however...

...The merits of the case for and the case against legislation to regulate industrial relations bore only a coincidental relationship to this situation...

...The days of cooperation with capitalism were over for this party...

...Once it had bellowed that the Yanks were not coming because Russia was an ally of the Nazis and didn't want Yanks interfering...

...This, in effect, was the proposition the President made to labor: "You have said you want impartial factfinding to win the public to your side in your disputes with management...

...Murray and his associates knew this situation as well, probably better, than anybody else...

...When it came, it;would strip labor of some of the freedoms it had come to regard as its inalienable rights...

...there wasn't any disagreement about them...

...Left to its own devices, Congress almost certainly would pass something far tougher than this B-B-H bill...

...Thus I am offering you insurance against the kind of legislation Congress will pass if I don't do anything...

...How they expected to beat it, if indeed they had any plan for beating it, wasn't clear...

...Caught between these pressures, Murray personified the dilemma of labor itself...

...A clear majority of Congressmen had made up their minds...

...Walter Reuther, the most brilliant of the young labor leadership crop, had been contending that the financial position of General Motors warranted a substantial wage increase for its workers—that the world's largest corporation could pay the increase without raising the price of its product...

...All sorts of proposals for regulation of labor were waiting...

...AND finally there was the crowd in the CIO euphoniously, or phoniously, called the left-wing—the Pressmen-Quill-Bridges ring...

...He was concerned with more immediate considerations and with the short-range objective of warding off all controls for as long as possible...

...At very least he was offering labor a marriage of convenience...

...If in this case he bit the helping hand extended by the President, as ha seemed to, there were mitigating circumstances...

...It was in this circle that third party talk was loudest—not because a third party-promised anything except a Republican victory, but because general disruption and disorganization was now the policy of the fifth column party...

...This was what the President's labor advisors had in mind when they helped Truman draft his message proposing enactment of a fact-finding bill...

...Murray had never been comfortable about the closeness of the CIO alliance with the Democratic Party...

...No previous President has ever asked for such a limitation...

...But the imposition of a limitation, now that organized labor wields so much power over American life, is probably an inevitable development...

...Other CIO leaders started muttering threats to quit Truman's Democratic Party, organize their own third party, and thus turn the country over to the Republican Party...

...Now that it was over^ they would wait no longer...

...The President's plan offered them a way of beating the more drastic of the pending bills, if they were willing to adjust themselves to a new and, from their point of view, less desirable, set of ground rules than those now governing industrial relations...

...Society will insist upon exercising through Government, some control over labor organizations, just as it insists upon exercising some control over public utilities and, in a more limited way, over all corporations...

...Southern Democrats and Republicans had both the will and the votes to pass repressive labor legislation...

...Some of Murray's worries were dramatized at the Labor-Management Conference immediately preceding the President's move...

...Murray, who had always seemed the sanest and most restrained of the labor big shots, certainly had not behaved in a rational fashion...

...The Democrats, out of some kind of loose party discipline, had been waiting at Truman's request to see what the Labor-Management Conference would turn up...

...What he chose to do was what labor, in the General Motors strike case, the most conspicuous of the current industrial stoppages, had been trying to do on its own...

...All he needed to clinch his case, so he said, was impartial inspection of General Motors' books...

...No argument would unmake them...

...The best known of them, the Ball-Burton-Hatch Bill, providing for compulsory arbitration in labor disputes affecting the public interest, was one of the more moderate of the pending measures...

...He was a lead dog in a pavlov world...

...I am offering you a way of getting this...

...SO the President sent Congress a plan under which General Motors' books were to be scrutinized by a commission representing the public...

...At that point the interested by-stander could have been excused for counting his toes and wondering whether it was he or everybody else who was nutty...

...The unpleasant facts were known to everybody...

...You can probably muster a one-third vote either in the House or Senate to sustain my veto, if I have to veto...

...Among Murray's other concerns was Sidney Hillman, founder and leader of the PAC, who had organized labor's Political Action Committee-for the benefit of President Roosevelt and later delivered it to Truman and who still thought, apparently, that labor's best interest would be served by a continued alliance with the Democratic Party...

...Labor's Dilemma By KENNETH CRAWFORD Washington, D. C. ONE of the curious phenomena of these curious times was the reaction of organized labor to President Truman's proposal that Congress pass legislation providing for mandatory fact-finding and cooling-offs in industrial relations...

...One of them was John L. Lewis, who had taken a position alongside management representatives against any Government interference with free enterprise, either on the management or labor end...

...He had been inclined toward the Gompers' view that labor's proper political role was that of the independent, selling its votes to the side that was willing to pay the highest price in campaign commitments...

...For months ever since V-J day, Congress had been hovering like a chicken hawk over labor's hen house...

...Anything contributing to the general confusion at home, meanwhile, was all to the good...