The South Secedes

The National Defense Mediation Board this week threw up its hands and for the first time admitted defeat. It had shattered its shining lance on a pile of coal. For nearly a month, while operators and miners wrangled, virtually no soft coal had been mined. Emergency supplies had dwindled by the hour, while steelmakers, munition makers, shipbuilders cursed. "Criminal" was the word OPM's angry William Knudsen used two weeks ago to describe any stoppage in the defense program. Shocking, at least, were the figures which showed what had happened as the result of the stoppage in coal.

American Iron and Steel Institute estimated that steel production had dropped from 98.3% to 96% last week, as one plant after another banked furnaces because of the shortage of coke. The estimated drop in tonnage: 74,500--enough tons of steel to manufacture some 80 or 90 submarines. If the strike continued, OPM estimated that steel production would drop to 95% of capacity this week, 85% the next, 60% the next.

Who was to blame? United Mine Workers' President John L. Lewis and Northern operators had agreed on a new wage scale: $7 a day (up from $6). This caused neither of them any pain, for the union got a pay rise and it cost the Northern operators nothing, since under the Guffey Coal Act their increased labor cost would be passed along to the public as part of the Government-fixed price of coal.

Like the Northerners, Southerners could add the increased labor cost to the price of coal, but their labor cost had been $5.60 a day and a rise to $7 would cost them their wage differential--the price of Southern coal would rise more than the price of Northern coal and the South would lose part of its coal market to the North. Aside from the debatable question of whether the Southern wage differential is justified, the obvious fact was that the Southern operators were the only parties to the proposed contract who were going to be worse off instead of better off by signing it. So the Southerners bolted the conference, and last week Secretary of Labor Perkins finally certified the dispute to the Mediation Board.

Fact was, Roosevelt, Perkins, William Davis, vice chairman of the Mediation Board, were all reluctant to call in the board except as a last resort. The risk of failure in this toughest of all disputes was much too great; failure would darken a good early record and spoil the growing psychological effect of a so-far-triumphant board.

Sure enough, the record was quickly spoiled. Mediator Davis had first laid the President's formula on the line: reopen Northern and Southern mines immediately, then negotiate, make terms of the final agreement retroactive. Northern miners were ready to comply. Said John L. Lewis: "We are in full accord." Said the Southern operators: "We cannot give a yes or no." In the end, they gave a No.

The Mediation Board panel (Davis, C.I.O.'s Clinton Golden, Standard Oil's Walter Teagle), convinced that the President's proposal was fair, put the blame for the breakdown squarely on the Southern operators. In their final report board members declared:

"They [the Southern operators] have not at any time been willing to agree that wages fixed by future negotiation be made retroactive to the date of resuming work."

The President put on the pressure. This week, in a hectic night session, the Southern operators suddenly caved in, agreed to a $1 per day wage boost. The South had returned to the union.

Sadly Burdened. As Madam Perkins certified another major dispute to the board, the Administration prayed for better luck. For two months General Motors and the C.I.O. Auto Workers had been negotiating a new contract. Differences narrowed down to union demands for a 10-c- wage boost and a closed shop; G.M. made a counter-offer of a wage rise, but to a closed shop answered flatly, No. Union leaders finally decided to strike. Last week Madam Perkins tossed this new hot potato over to the board. What the board could do with it was any man's guess. A good sign was G.M.'s prompt promise to make any final agreement retroactive to April 28, and the union's prompt acceptance of the board's proposal to keep work in all G.M. plants going at full tilt. Conciliator James Dewey, already on the scene, was urged to continue his labors until a delegation from the board could sit down with the disputants. Said the board to Dewey: "By so doing you will contribute not only to national defense but to the relief of this willing but sadly burdened board."

At week's end, the sadly burdened board had nine strikes on its hands, including the dispute at the John A. Roebling's Sons steel plants in Trenton and Roebling, N.J. Perkins had given up that dispute when C.I.O. strikers and non-strikers had attacked one another with jeers and baseball bats, and women strikers had stripped a woman non-striker of all but shoes and stockings. Blinking but unbowed, the Mediation Board ploughed on.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.