Heads I Win ...

The United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Union (C.I.O.) slapped a tough proposal on Economic Stabilizer James F. Byrnes's desk last week. Stabilize the U.S. economy fry Aug. 15, they said, in effect, or our 450,000 members will junk your "Little Steel" formula.

With a great show of inflation-hating (and some pungent remarks on the obvious fact that inflation control is fast losing its grip), the electrical workers offered to be good boys until then--even though most of their contracts with over 800 war-busy electrical plants come up for negotiation this month. But, in terms of dollars & cents, the offer was really a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition:

The union would not demand a general wage increase now if, from mid-March to mid-August, each firm sets aside a special fund covering the cost-of-living increase for all employes from May 15, 1942 to March 15,1943. (May 1942 was the month when the "Little Steel" formula stopped counting the rise in the cost of living.)

If by Aug. 15 Byrnes, OPA, et al. have licked the problem of price control, rationed all essential goods & services, put across "a fair tax program" (instead of what the union calls "soak-the-poor taxes"), the electrical workers will take their cost-of-living raise in war bonds. If not, they will insist upon "a flat cents-per-hour raise to the base rates of pay . . . to reflect the cost-of-living increase that will have taken place from May 15, 1942 to Aug. 15, 1943 . . . paid in money."

Cried U.E.R.M.W. President Albert J. Fitzgerald: "This proposal is a blow against inflation . . . here is what one union is willing to do to carry out the President's seven-point economic program." But the hard truth that Albert Fitzgerald's union overlooked is that the U.S. is already teetering on the brink of all-out inflation: the national income is already higher than the national capacity to produce consumer goods on top of its vast war production. Against that background there are only two kinds of pay increase that are really justifiable, by any standards except those of power politics: 1) those to correct genuinely "substandard" conditions and 2) those to induce an equal increase in production.

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