Union Teachers

C. I. O.'s able, thoughtful Philip Murray is chairman of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee. As such, he gets along well with many a big steelman and many a little foundryman. Of interest to such men is a brochure published this week under the imprint of Mr. Murray's union.

"This handbook," says the introduction, ". . . is about things a union can do after it has established itself and has won collective bargaining."

Chief thing the union can do, according to S. W. O. C.'s research staff, is to tell the employer what is wrong with his business. By union testimony, many things are wrong in many shops: wrangling executives who waste their and the employes' time, needlessly idle machinery, wastefully overstrained workmen, ignorance about markets, inventories, plant costs. Point of Mr. Murray's study is that a well-established, well-run union can encourage intelligent plant research in co-operation with management, thereby plugging rat holes down which employers' money and workers' jobs are lost. Chief point of interest for non-union citizens was the definition of a good union researcher:

"The man suited to this work is by nature painstaking, patient and tactful, with a strong sense of justice (which includes the knack of seeing the other fellow's point of view). . . . These qualities are obviously very different from those needed for organizing work. Men who have been most successful in organizing work often have no natural bent at accurate detail work, and, trained in strife situations, never if they can help it, admit that the opponent is right on any point. Now, as a natural result of the bitter struggle for recognition, many unions are now officered and dominated by men of the organizer type who have won and deserve control and are needed in the dominant positions. They tend, naturally, to prefer men of like abilities and, at times, distrust men of different kinds of ability--especially, perhaps, the research type. . . ."

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