Outlaw Strike

A union leader last week made news by marching through a picket line. It was no slip of the foot. John P. Frey, 70-year-old arch-conservative of the A.F. of L.'s conservative hierarchy, had said he would, and by gum he did. The pickets were A.F. of L. machinists who had shut down eleven San Francisco shipyards in the midst of a $500,000,000 Naval building program and earned the combined wrath of Government and labor officials. But the violation of the picket line by white-haired John Frey did not break the "outlaw" strike. Nonstriking boilermakers, painters went through the lines with him. Next day the U.S. Navy did its first convoying, when Captain W. P. Gaddis headed a convoy of trucks carrying more non-strikers through the line. But the scowling machinists, as they well knew, were the key men. Little work could be done until they went back, and at week's end they were still out.

Still unsettled was the soft-coal dispute, although mines were worked while disputants argued over the question of a 40-c- wage differential between North and South.

Southern operators did not improve the chances of a settlement when they bought space in the country's newspapers to proclaim that the wage differential was not the chief reason they had refused to sign a contract with John L. Lewis' miners; the chief reason was to prevent Lewis from becoming "dictator of this country," and they asked the public to help by writing Washington. Whatever Lewis' ambitions, there was little in the Southerners' citations to support their charge. Wrote Columnist Dorothy Thompson, after reading the ad: "There ought to be something like the SEC to protect ... the public against consciously fraudulent or misleading statements . . . that demand political action on the part of the public."

For its part, the National Defense Mediation Board set out to study both claims and facts. Said Mediator William Davis: "There can be no disagreement over a fact; there can only be ignorance."

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