Heat & Thaw

Big Labor was in high dudgeon last week over the handling of mobilization. To Washington officials stormed the A.F.L.'s William Green and the C.I.O.'s Philip Murray to file their complaints. They saw President Truman, Mobilizer Charles Wilson and Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston, whose big hello and sympathetic ear did little to calm them down. The mobilization program, grumbled Green and Murray, was being run by big business. To this, both Johnston and Wilson had an answer: they were willing to give a top union leader a top job if he took it on full-time just as the many businessmen in Washington have done. But so far, there were no takers.

Green and Murray also thought that John L. Lewis, bitter foe of the Administration, was getting preferential treatment. Their evidence: last week the Government thawed out its wage freeze to permit Lewis' coal miners to get a $1.60-a-day raise under their new contract signed before the freeze deadline (a coal price boost of 25-c- to 90-c- a ton was also permitted). Lewis, said Green and Murray, was now one wage round ahead of the A.F.L. and C.I.O. But the stabilizers had a soothing answer to that. They were hard at work on a general wage thaw to permit other unions to get roughly the same raise as the coal miners.

There were other hitches in the first week of the freeze. In Manhattan, futures trading in rubber, hides, metals and cotton was stopped because nobody knew how to operate under the freeze. Because raw wool and cotton were still uncontrolled, makers of wool and cotton goods refused to take orders. They knew how much they could charge under the freeze --but they didn't know how they could make money at those prices in the future while raw materials soared.* Many a retailer was in the same boat. Said a San Francisco grocer: "I'm selling coffee for 83-c- a pound, but now that I'm restocking I find that I have to pay 86-c- for it myself."

The biggest gripe from businessmen came from those who had gone along with the Government's voluntary rollback in December, then found themselves frozen at lower levels than their competitors. Price Boss Mike DiSalle hoped to fix that too by a new kind of price freeze based on pre-Korea profit margins rather than specific prices. This would permit businessmen to raise prices to meet rising costs. At week's end, it looked as if the "freeze" would not keep wages & prices from going up, but merely slow the rise.

*To avoid similar confusion in defense goods (an estimated 18% of total U.S. production for the next fiscal year), the Government last week exempted them from the price freeze.

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