Pictures & Packard

Last week Dr. Leo Wolman's Automobile Labor Board took its own means of defending itself against the American Federation of Labor's onslaughts, over which President Roosevelt had taken the Federation publicly to task week before (TIME, Feb. 18).

Reporting its progress for the past ten months, the Board proudly announced that discrimination by employers against employees was and had for some time been a thing of the past in the automotive industry; that, of 2,035 complaints it had received from Labor, all but 225 had been disposed of and in 1,061 cases discharged men had been taken back by companies without formal action by the Board; that, of the 73,862 workers in 13 plants eligible to date to vote in Board-supervised elections for collective bargaining representatives, nearly 90% of the employees had voted in spite of A. F. of L.'s ban on the balloting.

Also last week the Board effected a neat propaganda coup at the Packard plant in Detroit. For nation-wide consumption, Francis E. Ross, accounting professor at the University of Michigan who is in charge of the elections, carefully explained for the newsreels the mechanics of the balloting as pictures were taken of Packard workers going to the polls. The Packard vote, a primary election to select 40 men to run for places on a 20-man collective bargaining agency, went: 2,657 for unaffiliated candidates; 2,131 for company union candidates; no for the A. F. of L. union; 109 for Mechanics Educational Society of America; 18 assorted voted for I.W.W. and three other minor unions. Packard's workers' representatives will therefore probably be about half company and half free-lance men.

Meantime. A. F. of L.'s President William Green set out for the Midwest with the announced intention of seeing if an automobile strike would do his side any good.

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