LABOR: New Opinions

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In a year of great labor upheavals, last week's ample budget of strikes all but constituted a lull. Many of them, like the Plymouth four-day walkout of 11,000 workers at Detroit, were caused by jurisdictional disease. Some of them, like the grave diggers of Kansas City who in one day kept ten bodies from burial, originated in nothing less prosaic than demands for union recognition, closed shop and wage increase. However, if strikes failed to make labor news, three utterances did:

"Frenzied Passion." Four steel strikers were convicted for their part in the Republic Steel Corp. bombing in Warren, Ohio six weeks ago. In sentencing them Warren's Common Pleas Court Judge Lynn B. Griffith rebuked them as much in the name of Labor as in the name of Law: "In your frenzied passion you have violated the law, insulted the dignity and decency of the State of Ohio, endangered the lives and property, and overwhelmed this peaceable and quiet community by your indefensive course of conduct. . . . No labor union in our land approves or condones the erratic course you have pur sued. You do not represent union labor in its struggles and aspirations. You represent a wayward and unstable element of society. . . ."

"Legal Nonentity." United Automobile Workers of America asked the City of Dearborn for "legal protection" next time it wanted to hand out union literature at the Ford Motor Co. plant. Dearborn's Attorney James E. Greene denied the ap plication. His opinion:

"We have carefully investigated and find no actual existence of such an organization, registered as an organization, as a firm, partnership, person or persons doing business under an assumed name by and in accordance with the statutes of the State. . . . We are forced to conclude that the named confederation on whose behalf you communicate with our Chief of Police is a legal nonentity."

"Dictatorship." Harry Bridges, president of the Pacific Coast District of the International Longshoremen's Association and biggest figure in maritime labor on the Pacific Coast, leads the drive of C.I.O. in the West. In Tacoma, Wash, the Long shoremen's union not only refused to join C.I.O. but wrote to all I.L.A. locals on the Coast:

". . . The membership of this local cannot see what the C.I.O. has in any way to offer us. . . . The C.I.O., having been in existence for two years, has as yet not organized itself as a central federation. It has had no convention. It has no constitution and bylaws, and appears to be what John L. Lewis or some other high-up says it is. It appears to be a dictatorship by a top committee which is all against the principles fought for and established by the component organizations of the Maritime Federation of the Pacific Coast."