New World?

Never had labor worn such an air of confident authority. For two years, it had felt like a man shouting into a dead mike. Last week, with the power full on, labor listened with vast satisfaction as its voice rolled across the land and echoed in the corridors of the White House itself.

In Portland, Ore., the C.I.O. convention celebrated the triumph and planned for the future. Labor alone could not claim the credit for the election of Harry Truman. But labor was the biggest, most articulate and best-organized group in the Democratic coalition. And Truman's program had been labor's program.

The Human Welfare State. Even the cockiest delegates were a little awed as Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas told them what labor had wrought. Said Douglas: "The human welfare state is the great political invention of the 20th Century. Labor was its prime promoter ... All groups in society--farmers, business, and the professions--were its beneficiaries."

Labor's province, Douglas declared, was now the world. "It is labor, organized and independent labor, that can supply much of the leadership, energy, and motive which we need today." Its responsibility should no longer be confined to the bargaining table. Its responsibility was now national and international.

Said Douglas: "It is from the lips of American labor that Europe can most readily learn how democracy and freedom can be peacefully achieved in a framework of government . . . Doors tightly closed to all others may open at its knock ... It can prove by its own accomplishments that human welfare and progress can be achieved without class warfare." And at home, labor must take the lead in working with industry to assure maximum production and full employment.

Cried Douglas: "Today labor has it within its power to guide western civilization neither to the right nor to the left, but down the broad middle highway to abundance, to security and to peace."

With such words ringing in their ears, the C.I.O. delegates made big political plans. After pausing long enough to throw a scare into the Reds in their midst (see below), they talked of farmer-labor unity, discussed Government housing programs, price control, civil rights, medical insurance and federal aid to education. Said C.I.O. President Philip Murray: "We will obtain enactment of many important pieces of humanitarian legislation."

Biggest Slice. Just what did labor, with its new power and its new responsibility, want in its own field? To some, it looked as if the answer was simply that it wanted a hand in management. Answering Henry Ford II's statement that a fourth round of wages would necessitate higher prices, the U.A.W.'s Emil Mazey declared: "Our bargaining team can show Mr. Ford next spring that he can give a wage increase without raising the price of automobiles. Our experts will be glad to sit down with him and his associates, go over his books, and show him how this is possible."

Officially, the C.I.O. declared: "It is essential in a dynamic economy for wages to be ever increasing and for the wage segment of our national income to be enlarging through taking a larger share of an ever-increasing national income . . . It is possible for wages to increase and living standards to improve within the framework of a reasonable profit structure for American industry."

Such a policy confirmed the conclusion of Harvard Economist Sumner Slichter that the U.S. is already shifting from a capitalistic to a "laboristic" community--"a community in which employees rather than businessmen are the strongest single influence." Said Slichter: "The U.S. is virtually a nation of employees, since three out of four persons who work for a living are on someone else's payroll."

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