Violent End

The meat strike died hard. In Waterloo, Iowa, one hot afternoon last week, a 55-year-old Negro, who had gone back to work at the Rath Packing Co. after losing $375 in wages, fired his pistol when a swarm of strikers tried to tip over his tattered Model A Ford. A picket was killed; a woman striker was wounded. The strikers took out their fury on workers' autos. A parking lot fence was ripped down, 27 cars were overturned. Frightened workers stayed in the plant that night, went out next day under protection of Iowa's National Guard.

Next day a majority of the C.I.O Packinghouse Workers' strikers around the country voted to surrender to the companies' terms. This week most of the 80,000 strikers trudged back to work--for the 9-c--an-hour increase they had rejected at the strike's start 69 days before (TIME, May 24). For about 14,000 others the strike dragged on, pending settlement of other differences.

For the nation it had been a costly episode: housewives had paid undetermined millions in higher meat prices; farmers and livestock men had lost heavily. But for the strikers it was a near disaster. They had lost about $40 million in wages. Many stood to lose their jobs if it was proved that they had taken part in violence. At the end, the strikers had only a choice of abject surrender or wrecking their union by continuing an 'unpopular, losing fight. It was Labor's most painful beating on the postwar strike front.

*It was the strike's third fatality. The others: a Chicago striker run down by a truck which he tried to stop at the picket line; an East St. Louis picket, shot by a non-striker.

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