LABOR: C. I. O. Faces Defense

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Clouds hung last week like a sign in the sky over steel plants in Buffalo, Gary, Youngstown, South Chicago, Bethlehem. Pittsburgh, the city of steel, was dark, dirtier than ever as smoke belched from chimneys and rolled along the Monongahela. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, ore was fed into blast furnaces, cooked, tapped out in molten iron streams. Open-hearth and Bessemer furnaces converted iron into white-hot steel which was molded into ingots, rolled and tortured into flat slabs, long, thin blooms. In strip mills, finishing plants, hot metal and cold metal was drawn and pressed into tubes, sheets and ropes of steel—the very sinews of war. Sound filled the cavernous mills: thunder of machinery, shriek of steam, roar of Diesel engines hauling flatcars, demon wails of overhead cranes.

In the enormous black caverns, grimy, goggled pygmies crawled through the gloom, eating while they worked, shuffling home after their eight hours to their ugly homes in Duquesne, Clairton, Homestead, on the cliffs of Pittsburgh's South Side. The grimy little men and their doings were far less spectacular than the infernal mills. But if the men quit, so would the white-hot flow of steel.

To the U. S. it had become a matter of great concern that the men and machinery that make steel should keep going. The U. S. watched and kept its fingers crossed against the time it might have to make a fist. Let there be no stoppage of work. By stoppage, the U. S. people meant strikes. Let there be no strikes. If there were strikes for any except good reasons, the U. S. people would hold organized labor to blame.

Preventive measures had already been pondered, including legislation flatly outlawing strikes. But any plan would depend, in the last analysis, on the attitude of labor. So far as defense activity was concerned, the most important attitude in labor was the one taken by a tall, grey-haired citizen of Pittsburgh named Philip Murray.

Head of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee, vice president of United Mine Workers, and more important, president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, Murray is boss of the majority of workers in key industries of defense: automobiles, aircraft, rubber, clothing, electrical supplies, coal—and steel. Defense industry will have to listen to him soon. For every boom, including a defense boom, touches off labor trouble. Such troubles are now being made as surely as airplanes and tanks. Whether they can be settled without weakening the preparations of the U. S. and without impairing the rights of labor depends first on Philip Murray.

Murray has already spoken to auto and aviation through his lieutenant Roland J. Thomas, has spoken to electrical industries through James B. Carey. Last week he got ready to speak to steel. S. W. O. C. has continuing contracts with President Benjamin Fairless of U. S. Steel, and President H. Edgar Lewis of Jones & Laughlin. Either side may reopen negotiations at any time. Murray let it be known that he thought it was time. He also announced that he would send an aide, lanky Clinton Golden, to Manhattan to discuss with President Raoul Desvernine a new contract with Crucible Steel. Labor and industry were approaching the show down stage.