Fire Season

In the sullen summer heat, strikes smouldered into flame like scattered forest fires. To spotters in the Bureau of Labor Statistics there was nothing new in this--the spark of labor unrest always kindles fastest in summer, when men are irritable, when contract negotiations deadlock, when picketing is most comfortable. But after more than three years of use, the slow fire apparatus of the War Labor Board was sadly worn. In Akron, Ohio, the nation's rubber capital, there was proof that the U.S. had only one certain method of extinguishing stubborn strikes --a Presidential order for seizure of plants.

Akron's troubles stemmed ostensibly from deadlocked contract negotiations. But they were also compounded of more inflammatory stuff--old resentments, a bitter intra-union feud between United Rubber Workers' President Sherman Dalrymple (who wanted no strike) and locals which had repudiated the no-strike pledge.

Last week, after 16,700 Goodyear workers had been off the job for 15 days, Firestone's 16,500 employes went on strike too. With two other major companies shut down for repairs, Akron was paralyzed. U.S. manufacture of military tires, tubes, self-sealing gasoline tanks dwindled dangerously. Appeals to strikers' patriotism failed; so did "orders" from WLB. Finally (only four days after he had ordered seizure of the Port Arthur, Tex., plants of the Texas Co.), Harry Truman told the Navy to take over the Goodyear plants.

Obediently, Goodyear strikers, whose strike had cost the U.S. 272,000 tires, an equal number of tubes, trooped back to work. But Firestone employes made no move to follow suit. At week's end it seemed probable that, to restore full production, other Akron plants would have to be seized.

Elsewhere in the nation the labor situation was relatively calm, but uneasy. Strikes involving 6,000 men at Toledo's Spicer Manufacturing Corp., 8,000 at Mobile's Gulf Shipbuilding Corp., 7,900 at Mack Manufacturing Corp. plants in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, threatened no immediate hardship to the armed forces. Detroit was quiet.

But summer was not over, and ahead in the tindery future lay the industrial problems, of reconversion and peace. Many a U.S. citizen hoped that Harry Truman's new fire warden, Lewis Schwellenbach, would overhaul his equipment fast, then get some good men into the woods to keep sparks from flying.

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