Lumps for the Left

Phil Murray did not like to see his scrappy brood of C.I.O. kids kick each other around. But Papa Phil could not have been very displeased at some of last week's infighting. Some of the C.I.O.'s Red-eyed bully boys--whom he does not like--were getting their lumps.

The Communist-cored Greater New York C.I.O. Council, which was noisily defying Murray's edict against backing Henry Wallace, took a stiff right hook from Michael J. Quill, boss of the C.I.O. Transport Workers Union. Tough Mike, heeding Murray's gospel, quit as president of the council, and advised New York City's 42,000 subway workers and bus drivers to have nothing more to do with it.

That did not mean that Quill, one of labor's most devoted followers of the far-left line, had been converted all the way over to the right. But it did mean that Quill had put trade unionism ahead of politics and would be on Phil Murray's side if a showdown with the C.I.O.'s Communist-liners developed.

There was no doubt about which side had Phil Murray's unspoken sympathy in another fight. Last week the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers, the biggest Communist-wired union of all, cried out for Murray to do something about "raids" on its membership by right-winger Walter Reuther's United Automobile Workers. A fortnight ago two large U.E. locals (about 4,500 members) in Hartford, Conn., voted overwhelmingly to secede from the U.E. and join a new U.A.W. local. Their reason: long feuding between the locals' non-Communist leaders and the U.E.'s top bosses.

All that Murray did about it was to issue a perfunctory statement that raiding could never be condoned. That, of course, was meant to be a warning slap against any such shenanigans within the family. But to many a C.I.O. man it seemed more like a soft-gloved pat of encouragement for Walter Reuther.

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