National Affairs: Steel Workers' First

In June 1936 when John L. Lewis set up the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee, the moribund Amalgamated Association of Iron, Steel & Tin Workers had some 10,000 members and no important contracts. Working from a big modern office covering the entire 36th floor of Pittsburgh's Grant Building—a few floors above Ernest Tener Weir's anti-union National Steel Corp.—the S. W. O. C. has since then put on the most efficient organizing campaign in the history of U. S. labor. In 18 months it 1) opened company towns to union organizers, 2) jacked the Amalgamated membership to 500,000 (according to its own claims), 3) obtained contracts from 445 steel companies, among them U. S. Steel. Only a handful of concerns, including Tom M. Girdler's Republic Steel Corp. and other embattled members of the "Little Steel" entente, have held out against the S. W. O. C. attack, and only then at the cost of a long and hard-fought strike.

To review its record and ponder its future the S. W. O. C. last week held its first national convention in Pittsburgh. Since S. W. O. C. is not a union but an organizing group headed by Philip Murray, the convention was, in effect, a policy-making body made up of nearly 1,000 delegates from Amalgamated lodges. Four out of five delegates went to the convention straight from the heat of the mills. Nearly half of them were old company union men who had helped lead their organizations into C. I. O. Daily for four days they packed themselves into the smoke-blue auditorium of Islam Grotto in Pittsburgh's slummy North Side, across the Allegheny River from the Golden Triangle. That the S. W. O. C. had picked up a trick or two from Fascist and Communist propagandists was evident from the huge posters of brawny steelworkers, the heroic pictures of Phil Murray and Leader Lewis. Conspicuously dangling by the neck was an effigy of Tom Girdler.

For Phil Murray, who is as good a student of heavy industry as any steelmaster, the occasion was not one for unrestrained celebration. He could and did declare: "In not one instance has any officer, national, sub-regional or lodge, ever authorized or fostered a strike in a mill under contract. . . . Observe your contract and your union grows. Violate it and your union dies."

But although many a potent steelman considers the union a blessing, S. W. O. C. contracts begin to expire in February, starting with Big Steel, and the fact that the steel industry is operating at only 27% of capacity will not assist their renewal on terms favorable to the union. From union figures it was estimated that 224,000 steel & allied workers have been laid off in the past few months, and that only a small fraction of those still employed are working full time. Union membership has sagged, as it always does in hard times, and dues are so hard to collect that the S. W. O. C., "for reasons of economy," has had to cut its force of organizers and officeworkers from 437 to 354 (including 75 part-time organizers). Though numerous resolutions were offered asking for a $6-a-day minimum instead of $5 a day and a 30-hour instead of a 40-hour week, the convention finally left it to Phil Murray & friends to get the best bargain they could.