LABOUR STRIFE

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XXXVI, Issue 9063, 24 April 1937, Page 3

LABOUR STRIFE

PiiOBLEM DISCUSSED IN U.S.A.

AVERTING TROUBLE

FRENCH AND ENGLISH METHOD

(By a Staff Correspondent of "The Christian Science Monitor")

WASHINGTON, March 9

With the two great rival labour organisations, the American Federation of Labour and the Committee for Industrial Organisation, both planning here to-day new onslaughts on industry's crumbling resistance to unionisation of American labour, high Government officials rushed studies of foreign labour laws in an atmosphere of growing conviction that the United States will soon have to put its industrial house in order. Experts at the Department of Labour under the supervision of Edward F. McGrady, assistant secretary of the department, analysed in particular the method by which France and England have at the same time met labour's desire for full recognition of collective bargaining rights with the imposition on labour unions of responsibility and discipline. No decision has yet been reached on a recommended best course of action in this country. In fact it is still doubtful whether labour leaders are yet willing to accept the conclusion in Government circles that responsibility for labour is a corollary of rights. But what would have seemed impossible two weeks ago is daily becoming more inevitable in the view of responsible Government officials. SIT-DOWNS VISIT CAPITAL \

Not the least factor in goading official Washington to a new conception of the labour problem is the outbreak of the sit-down strike here within two blocks of the White House. The new wave of strikes in Detroit closing down on Chrysler and Hudson production lines is appreciated as serious and important. But no problem is ever quite so quickly appreciated at a distance as it is at home.

When, 103 waiters .waitresses cooks and kitchen help sat down at their jobs in the famous New Willard Hotel the capital discovered that what had heretofore been an abstract issue had become a very, immediate one. The New Willard is in the heart of official Washington and is used frequently for important meetings and conventions connected in varying degrees with aspects of Government. '

Last night when the strike went into effect Labour's Non-Partisan League—the political subsidiary of the C. 1.0. —was in session in the New Willard's ballroom organising support for the President's court revision programme. Delegates were waiting for the last and most important speaker, John L. Lewis. Eut Mr Lewis never arrived. Although the strikers' union is not affiliated with the C. 1.0. which Mr Lewis heads, he refused to go through a picket line. Even when the strikers offered to withdraw the picket line to permit him to enter without going through it he declined, insisting that he would not enter the hotel while the strike was in process, even with the permission of the strikers.

WHITE HOUSE STUDIES PROBLEM

How soon the aggravated strike situation, now dramatised for Washington's benefit by the Willard sitdown, will produce legislative action is extremely uncertain.- The type of legislation in the minds of Department of Labour officials would very probably have to await either a constitutional amendment or the President's court reorganisation. But the subject is receiving the most. earnest consideration not only at the Department of Labour but at the White House as well.

The general theory being pursued is that the Government should guarantee full collective bargaining : rights; should provide machinery for compulsory mediation of all labour disputes; and should prohibit strikes until mediation has been attempted sincerel yby both sides and failed. Under such a system the strike would become a last resort, of a dissatisfied majority, and not the first resort of any small minority over any trivial grievance. While the new strike wave was turning the thoughts of Government officials in this direction, labour leaders themselves were planning new worlds to conquer. John Lewis conferred with his C.X.O. subordinates over their next major move which is to be in the textile industry and the problem of consolidating gains in such industries as automobiles where an entering wedge has been secured.

A.F. OF L. PLANS DRIVE At the rival headquarters of the American Federation of Labour, William Green, its president, and his ablest organisers prepared a campaign to contest the complete domination of the steel industry by the C. 1.0. and to launch the A.F. of L. on a new membership campaign on many other fronts. In steel the federation group will seek to dominate fabrication plants, although leaving other sections of the industry to the C. 1.0. Mr Green announced that the A.F. of L. had determined to protect the jurisdictional rights of its international union of bridge, structural and ornamental iron workers “in the erection and fabrication of steel.” In addition to defending the jurisdiction of an A.F. of L. craft in steel, the organisation also plans to press organisation drives among cement, aluminium, food and cereal mill, and gas and filling station workers. In the aluminium and gas and filling station trades there will be a clash between federation organisers and the C. 1.0., which is making rapid headway in both.

The federation drive results from a conference yesterday at which the question before its leaders was whether to complete with the C. 1.0. Cor the championship of American labour generally, or sit back and be satisfied with the small highly skilled groups while John Lewis enrolls the millions of unskilled and semiskilled workers who to-day belong to no union at all in the C. 1.0. rankti.

The result is inevitably going to be the consumption of much labour energy in internal friction between the rival groups. But the rivalry will also express itself in organising efforts outside. Two great organisations are now trying to best each other in the enrollment of new members. Despite the loss through inter-