Settle Out of Court?

Labor unions knew just how Dr. Frankenstein felt. After scaring industry out of its wits with monstrous portal-to-portal suits, unions last week got scared too.

As the suits for back pay rose to billions, the C.I.O.'s legal counsel, Lee Pressman, admitted that the whole business had got out of hand.* Cried he: "They are fantastic. Local lawyers have gone hog-wild. Suits for those incredible sums have fanned the flames of anti-unionism."

What worried Lee Pressman and other union leaders were the effects of the suits on the whole body of the Wages & Hours Act. Last week, the Senate started hearings on bills to slam the door against portal pay suits. The one which really raised the hair of unionists was the bill of Indiana's Republican Senator Homer Capehart. It sounded reasonable. The bill would prohibit suits against any employer who had "acted in good faith" to obey the Wages & Hours Act. But under this bill, which many Congressmen favored, unionists knew that it would be almost impossible to sue an employer, even for substandard wages, which had nothing to do with portal pay. The none-too-clear Supreme Court ruling, handed down by labor's old friend, Justice Frank Murphy, had obviously opened the door to much current trouble for unions along with the hoped-for future benefits. Plainly, the time had come to backtrack fast.

A.F.L. President William Green urged his unions to withdraw portal-to-portal suits, settle all claims over the bargaining table. More significantly, C.I.O.'s big United Steel Workers and United Automobile Workers withdrew eight claims against Detroit manufacturers totaling nearly $8 million.

The companies had allowed for travel time in the contracts. (Many another union which had run to court was finding out the same things.) At week's end, the C.I.O. was coming around to Bill Green's way of thinking. But until Congress changes the Wages & Hours Act, courts have held that out-of-court settlements did not relieve employers of liability.

*In Buffalo the Auto Workers Union filed a $4 billion suit against Bell Aircraft Co. Nobody batted an eye. Later it was discovered that billion had been written instead of million--an error of $3,996,000,000.

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