Action

On the labor fronts:

> To 50,000 Akron rubber workers, striking because a pay raise of 8-c- an hour recommended by a WLB panel had been reduced by the Board itself to 3-c-. President Roosevelt sent a stern telegram which damned the strike as "inexcusable," curtly ordered: "Return to work at once." The strikers went back. They had lost in five days enough time to have produced some $17,000,000 worth of plane deicers, self-sealing gas tanks, combat tires, life rafts, anti-aircraft guns, gas masks. They still demanded the 8-c-.

> Ignoring the "Little Steel" formula, a National Railway Labor Panel emergency board recommended to the President an 8-c--an-hour wage boost for over one million nonoperating railroad employes.

> Hearings were scheduled in New York next week on the demand of 350,000 operating railroad employes for a 30% raise.

> A significant procession of labor advisers filed into the White House one by one: George Harrison of the Railway Clerks, Philip Murray of C.I.O., Anna Rosenberg of the War Manpower Commission, David B. Robertson of the Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen. All four have worked for labor unity.

> The Machinists' Union announced its withdrawal from A.F. of L. Thus the prospective A.F. of L. gain of Lewis' 600,000 mine workers was offset by the loss of 565,000 machinists. The machinists' grievance, 29 years old, was jurisdictional.

> In Washington, John Lewis stalked into the Statler Hotel room where the mine operators were conferring, slammed down his brief case and barked: "Gentlemen, you have had plenty of time to confer, and I suppose you are ready to sign a contract. You are familiar with the War Labor Board proposal, which we accept, but we want $2 a day additional, as we originally requested. [Pause] And I do not want any one-legged counter proposals from you!" At midnight the miners struck.

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