LABOR: Peace for the Duration?

"I congratulate you—I thank you. . . . May I now wish you all a Merry Christmas."

With this airy-fairy wave of the wand, Franklin Roosevelt ended his management-labor conference. He had to do something magical to make it disappear. The conferees had locked horns so dashingly over one basic point that the sound of their snorts and tramplings was beginning to be embarrassing. What the President had widely advertised as a peace conference was about to turn into a battle royal.

Moderator William Davis and Vice Moderator Elbert Thomas, Senator from Utah, had gone to Mr. Roosevelt in despair. There were three points, they reported, on which all hands would agree: 1) no strikes or lockouts for the duration; 2) settlement of all disputes through step-by-step conciliation, mediation, arbitration; 3) creation of a War Labor Board to handle the disputes. But management wanted a fourth point: no further discussion of the closed shop until the war 'is over. Labor wanted to discuss nothing else but.

Like the old stage manager he is, Mr. Roosevelt took one look and rang down the curtain. In a grateful curtain speech he accepted the three points as a formula for labor peace—completely ignoring Point No. 4—said the show was over, and asked the audience to go out quietly.

Labor members made no effort to hide their delight. Industrialist members, stunned by the President's legerdemain (some privately characterized his action in plainer language), finally gathered wits and declared: "[We] accept the President's direction. ..." Stating their conviction that the closed shop was "the most highly controversial and emotional question in industrial relations today," they therefore appealed to labor, in effect, not to press the issue while the war is on.

Management felt that it had been dealt a card out of a marked deck, but it could not overlook the fact that its tactical position on the labor front had not been changed for the worse. Labor, on the other hand, had agreed to give up its only weapon—its right to strike. Some observers were willing to predict that labor chiefs, having maintained the principle of the closed shop, would not make an issue of it again while the U.S. was at war, certainly had no intention of causing the kind of hullabaloo that John L. Lewis had started with his captive coal mine fight. Observers believed also that the U.S. could now expect an end to serious wartime strikes.

This week Mr. Roosevelt got ready to announce the setup of the War Labor Board, which will take the place of William Hammatt Davis' now moribund National Defense Mediation Board.