LABOUR DISPUTES IN U.S.

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24763, 2 January 1946, Page 5

LABOUR DISPUTES IN U.S.

Effort To Prevent Steel Strike

“ONE OF WORST PERIODS” (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright)

(Rec. 9 p.m.) NEW YORK, Dec. 31 With strikes voted or ordered which would make 2,000,000 workers idle. January appears to bfe headed for one of the worst periods of labour troubles in the history of the United States. Strikes planned involve telephone and telegraph, steel, electrical, and building workers, in addition to the 386,000 at present idle. In an effort to forestall a threatened steel strike on January 14 of 800,000 workers, President Truman has appointed a three-man fact-finding board to investigate the situation. He has further directed the Office of Price Administration to survey steel prices and see whether a price increase is justified.

Mr William Davis, arbitrator in the longshoremen’s strike which tied up shipping for 18 days in October, has granted the longshoremen a 20 per cent, basic . wage increase. Both sides agreed to accept Mr Davis’s decision. The .fact-finding panel investigating the General Motors Corporation strike has adjourned sine die to prepare its recommendations, to be submitted possibly within a fortnight. General Motors said that the idea of ability to pay was not applicable to an individual business within an industry as a basis for raising its wages beyond the existing rate. The corporation refused to subscribe to what it believed would ultimately mean the death of the system of competitive enterprise. The firm was not contending that it had or had not the ability to pay. but it withdrew from the factfinding procedure because apparently the panel’s findings were to be made politically on suph economic factors as costs, prices, and profits, on which business success and progress depended.

If the American people wanted a regimented economy, they must make their choice through accredited representatives in Congress, said the corporation. General Motors for itself declined to take-such a great responsibility. The vice-president of the United Automobile Workers (Mr Reuther) said that unless General Motors negotiated a wage increase based on its ability to pay, the American people would be faced with a winter of industrial war that might spread to all American industry. The United Automobile workers would not accept less than a 30 per cent, increase except and to the extent that the economic facts might show that General Motors could not pay that increase without increasing prices to the consumer. If the General Motors statement represented the thinking of all American business then it was a case of “God help the American people.” If facts and reason failed again, the workers were prepared to stay on the picket lines for the duration of the home-front war, however long it might last. This fight was “for keeps.”