Rights, Wrongs, Zippers

Among the molders of public opinion, professional and amateur, the rights & wrongs of the labor-management dispute were still the prime topic.

Up stepped balding Director Roger N. Baldwin of the Civil Liberties Union, staunch defender of labor's rights, to give labor a stern warning. Unions, he said, must stop abusing the right to picket by such tactics as the use of force and mass picketing which deny the right of management, maintenance crews and office workers to enter struck plants.

Nicholas Murray Butler, 83, Columbia University's president emeritus, thought that strikes and lockouts had reached the stage of civil war. His cure: "Prevent strikes and lockouts by law--absolutely."

The Independent Citizens' Committee of the Arts, Sciences & Professions, Inc., among whose labor statesmen are numbered Cinemactress Olivia de Havilland, Actor Fredric March and Playwright Moss Hart, got into the fray with $1,840 worth of newspaper ads. They urged Americans to contribute to the strikers at General Motors, General Electric, U.S. Steel or "any other struck corporation." (Presumably each strike's issues and merits were beside the point.)

Voice of the Layman. No artist, scientist or professor is dark, energetic David Silberman, born 49 years ago on Manhattan's teeming lower East Side. David Silberman is a man with a flair for developing machinery. President of the Cap-Tin Development Corp., he employs 75 to 100 people and makes about $1,000,000 worth of zippers per year in 10,000 square feet of space at 578 Broadway.

When he went to prewar Europe to set up zipper factories, he also set himself the task of analyzing the Continent's political and economic problems. Cheerfully unabashed by the failure of the world's statesmen, he put his conclusions into a book, soon to be published, called A United Europe--or Else.

One day last week David Silberman paid the New York Times $2,600 cash for a full page ad--"A Plea from a Bewildered Small Business Man." If his book has the same kind of simple human warmth it should be a bestseller. For David Silberman put his finger on the little man's attitude:

"I manufacture zippers. I cannot get enough tape. I cannot get enough metal. I cannot get enough labor. I cannot get enough of anything except customers. If I could get enough material, and enough labor, and my competitors could too, very soon between us we would make so many zippers . . . that there would be no possibility of increased prices and no danger of inflation, at least so far as zippers are concerned.

"What is true of my business ... is true of buttons and dresses and fabrics and steel and autos and locomotives and finger bowls and toothpicks and of applesauce.

"Labor--Please stop your strikes.

"Management--Please pay your employe a higher wage, remember he is your best customer.

"Government--Trust us--Don't regulate us. We'll hold the line--Voluntarily.

"Please, everybody, get together and let me make my zippers."

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