"A Tremendous Victory"

It was about ten years since the respectable bosses of the railroad brotherhoods made the big discovery: if they acted more like John Lewis and those fellows, if they just sat stubbornly through wage negotiations and thumbed their noses at mediators and fact-finding boards, a New Deal Government would give them almost everything they wanted.

The strategy worked in 1941 and 1943. Despite Harry Truman's fuming that railroad strikers ought to be conscripted into the Army, it worked again in 1946, again in 1948. The new policy made a joke out of what for years had been recognized as the model machinery for settling labor disputes: the Railway Labor Act.

Last week the collapsing machinery let out what sounded like a final wheeze.

Settlement Rejected. The union bosses who had thrown the latest monkey wrench into the act were two mild-looking men, 58-year-old William P. Kennedy, president of 210,000 trainmen, and 62-year-old Roy 0. Hughes, president of 38,000 conductors. For 17 months, Kennedy and Hughes had been demanding that the carriers cut the work week in yards from 48 hours to 40, at the same time grant a 31-c--an-hour wage boost so that yardmen would make as much money as when they worked the full 48. Actually, wages would be higher, since workers would get in more overtime at time-and-a-half. Similar demands were made on behalf of 168,000 trainmen and conductors who worked out on the roads. When management balked, the dispute chugged for 15 months through channels up to a decision by a presidential board of fact-finders.

In this case no one could ask for a more impartial board: Justice Roger I. Mc-Donough of the Utah Supreme Court, former Indiana Supreme Court Justice Mart J. O'Mally, and Gordon S. Watkins, provost of California's Riverside College. Their compromise solution: cut yard hours to 40, raise wages 18-c-; but no change for men working on the roads. Management accepted-but the unions disdainfully refused, and eagerly suggested that the Government take over the yards.

Roads Seized. At the urging of Dr. John Steelman, Harry Truman's labor adviser, management made another offer. To the fact-finders' offer, they added a 5-c--an-hour boost for all hands and an escalator clause guaranteeing a 1-c- wage boost with every one-point rise in the cost of living. Still Kennedy and Hughes said no. To show they meant business, they ordered a token strike in three terminals and two feeder railroads. Last week, apparently in a more amenable mood, they promised Steelman that they would not extend the token strikes. But 45 minutes later, they gave the signal for a nationwide railroad strike to begin this week.

Harry Truman, hopping mad, said in effect that the brotherhoods had broken their word, and reacted as Kennedy and Hughes had anticipated. The President seized the railroads; Assistant Secretary of the Army Karl Bendetsen was put in charge. Management, not the Government, would continue to manage the roads. But Kennedy and Hughes obviously expected that now they would eventually get what they wanted. In a Washington hotel suite, Will Kennedy pumped Boss Hughes's hand and crowed: "A tremendous victory."

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