Threat Averted

Last week a large section of the automotive industry sighed with relief at the end of a situation which had threatened to disrupt its whole vast production line. In Detroit the week-old strike of Briggs Manufacturing Co.'s 6,000 employes (TIME, Feb. 6) was definitely broken, with some 4,000 old and new workers bringing production rapidly back to normal.

Lack of bodies, which Briggs makes for it, last fortnight caused Ford Motor Co. to shut down its assembly plants throughout the U. S. and in Windsor, Canada. Briggs makes bodies and stampings for several other motor companies and for Murray Corp. (bodies) which had to shut down. Some 7,650 accessory companies likewise supply parts & materials to Briggs' customers. Had the strike continued, the production of all these companies might have been seriously diminished, if not in some cases suspended.

With a supply of bodies assured, Ford officials called back a few skilled workmen, planned to recall the rest of their 100,000 employes early this week.

To help settle the Briggs strike, one of the Depression's most ominous threats, the U. S. Department of Labor sent its Field Commissioner Robert M. Pilkington, 58, onetime superintendent of an Indiana iron foundry and of the Labor Department's employment service. He is a quiet, even-tempered, slightly bald man who likes to be with his family. In order to get back to Indiana where they were living he became a labor conciliator in 1926. He has mediated several Indiana cinema theatre strikes, the Mishawaka, Ind. Rubber Goods factory strike.

With many onetime Briggs employes still on strike for better pay and working conditions last week, Mayor Frank Murphy's impartial fact-finding committee of Detroit citizens issued a statement guardedly substantiating many of the strikers' complaints. Well-grounded, said the committee, appeared these charges: that production was speeded up to a degree dangerous to machine workers; that female employes worked 14 consecutive hours; inadequate washrooms and lavatories in one plant; wages as low as 10-c- an hour.

Soon after the strike began, Briggs announced a return to a guaranteed hourly wage with a minimum of 25-c- an hour. Workers still striking last week demanded a minimum of 50-c- for men, 45-c- for women.

The Briggs difficulty had no sooner become quiescent this week than the industry had something new to worry about. In Detroit, 3,000 workers in Hudson Motor Car Co.'s body plant struck, demanding a 20% wage increase. Hudson officials blamed the leaders of the Briggs strike, closed down the motor manufacturing department and chassis assembling lines--depriving 3,000 more workmen of jobs.

Henry Ford took occasion last week to announce the next major step in his industrial career. He envisions thousands of small rural factories making Ford parts, largely from farm products. Workers would spend part time in the fields, part in the factory. Only motors and other vital parts would be made in a large central plant. Objects of such decentralization would be operating economy and resuscitation of the farm.

Holding up a steering wheel, a distributor box and other Ford parts made from soy beans, Mr. Ford declared that much else of an automobile can be "grown on a farm." Said he: "Bodies . . . can be made from cellulose of corn stocks, with a woven wire reinforcement inside and steel reinforcement at the doors, and will be lighter, stronger and quieter than metal bodies."

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