The C.I.O. of 1951

In appearance and manner, the 600 sedate delegates who moved into New York's Commodore Hotel last week might have been members of the Cost Accountants Association. They were, in fact, the fulltime, salaried union officers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, on hand for their 13th convention. In earlier years, C.I.O. conventions sometimes left a trail of broken chairs, smashed ash trays, torn tablecloths and echoes of roaring battles on the convention floor. But now the hairlines were drawing back, the waistlines were pushing forward and the blood was cooler.

This was a placid gathering. The biggest issue that might have thrown it into turmoil was deferred when 65-year-old Phil Murray, recovered from an almost fatal illness, agreed to carry on as C.I.O. president. He was unanimously re-elected for his twelfth term. Nominating Murray, bearded Jacob S. Potofsky, president of the Clothing Workers, called him "not only a labor leader but a leader of mankind." To take some of the load off Murray, Organization Director Allan Haywood was named to the new position of executive vice president.

That left just two important issues. One was restricted, the other so wide that it could affect every citizen of the U.S.

Scramble for 800,000. C.I.O. unions have been fighting each other in plant elections. As a result, they have lost some members to a "no union" vote or to the A.F.L. This tussling became a major problem after the C.I.O. in 1949 expelled eleven Communist-dominated unions. Other C.I.O. unions began to scramble for the 800,000 thus cut adrift. United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther and President James B. Carey of the International Union of Electrical Workers have been feuding bitterly over 30,000 former members of the expelled United Electrical Workers Union. Last July, the problem was sharply illustrated when three C.I.O. unions, chemical, electrical and oil, battled for the right to organize employees of the National Carbon Co. in Cleveland. As a result of this row, the workers voted "no union." The C.I.O. executive board drew up a plan under which the national organization or an arbitrator will assign disputed plants to one union or another, forbid rivals from campaigning against the chosen union in plant elections.

Some delegates objected to a provision that the national C.I.O. should consider geographic area in deciding a dispute. That would be like assigning all C.I.O. members in Detroit to the U.A.W. and all in Pittsburgh to Murray's steelworkers, they said. Nevertheless, the plan, which sacrifices the principle of plant self-determination to the principle of unity, was quietly approved by the convention without a dissenting vote.

Is Anybody Listening? The wider issue, the question of wage stabilization, was not so easily settled. The Truman Administration sent in a team of speechmakers to urge the C.I.O. to take it easy on the wage front. Truman opened the discussion in his message to the convention. "We must get our own defense production program rolling in high gear," he said, "and we must find the way to do this without bringing on renewed inflation ... It means restrained and responsible actions by businessmen, farmers--and workers, too . . ." Later, after a $15-a-plate roast beef dinner, Price Stabilizer Mike DiSalle had his try. The delegates obviously weren't interested in what he had to say. They chatted among themselves and paid so little attention that, at one point, DiSalle broke into his prepared speech and asked them to listen. The Transport Workers' bellicose Mike Quill finally quieted the crowd when he rose and threatened to throw out of the dining room the next "guest of the banquet" who uttered a sound. DiSalle then went on to say that "in an inflationary defense economy, the strong unions must be careful they do not improve their members' standards of living at the expense of other workers." Economic Stabilizer Eric Johnston tried, too: "You in labor must exercise self-restraint, just as I said to business they must exercise self-restraint --and I don't have too much success there, either."

It was soon apparent that the Administration line was not a success with the C.I.O. The Textile Workers President Emil Rieve, who is a member of the Wage Stabilization Board, expressed the sentiments of many delegates. "The employer gets two shots against our one," he said. "By that I mean that when the worker goes out on strike, and if that strike is lost, the employer defeats the workers, and that is the end of the story. But if the workers go out on strike and they win it their victory cannot be enjoyed by them. They must go to the board . . . and there the employer comes around once again and . . . requests the board not to approve that agreement because it is inflationary."

The convention's wage resolution and the speeches boiled down to a C.I.O. policy of demanding less flexibility for prices, more flexibility for wage increases. Phil Murray gave the issue a practical turn. His steelworkers union, he said, expects to

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