National Affairs: Board on Ford

After the Supreme Court upheld the Wagner Act last April the United Automobile Workers undertook to find out what effect, if any, the decision had had on Henry Ford's attitude toward organized Labor. The rest of the motor industry and most of the steel industry had already capitulated to John L. Lewis' C. I. O. Ford Motor Co. remained as Labor's No. 1 objective. Armed with permits from the City of Dearborn to distribute literature, a U. A. W. group marched to the gate of Ford's River Rouge plant, the world's largest industrial concentration employing more than 80,000 workers, and there last May in the historic ''Battle of the Overpass" received the beatings of their lives. On complaint from the union, the National Labor Relations Board cited Ford Motor Co. for violation of the Wagner Act, and hearings were held a few weeks later in Detroit. Last week in a 22,000-word report, its most-publicized decision to date, the Labor Board announced its verdict: guilty. Ford Motor Co. was ordered to cease & desist from all anti-union activities, including "disseminating among its employes statements or propaganda disparaging or criticizing labor organizations"—a direct crack at Henry Ford.

In weighing the Ford contention that the Battle of the Overpass occurred on company property, the Board noted: "Technical trespass has never been recognized in law as a fortification for extreme brutality. . . . It was clearly unnecessary for the respondent in protecting its property to blackjack and otherwise maltreat defenseless men & women, to break William Merriweather's back, to take Alvin Stickle into the plant proper and there give him a delayed but nevertheless severe beating."

Ford was not listed in Senator La Follette's "bluebook" of labor espionage last week (see above), for Ford is traditionally self-sufficient. Such services are provided by Harry Bennett's service department—"the chief weapon . . . in this fight to prevent self-organization among its employes." The report continued: "This department played the principal role in the savage beatings of May 26. . . . The record leaves no doubt that the Service Department has been vested with the responsibility of maintaining surveillance over Ford employes not only during their work but even when they are outside the plant, and of crushing at its inception, by force if necessary, any signs of union activity. Thus within the respondent's vast River Rouge plant at Dearborn the freedom of self organization guaranteed by the Act has been replaced by a rule of terror and repression. . . ." Going on to picture the service department as sort of the OGPU of the Ford organization, the Board said: "With service men present and interfering with the normal operation of the assembly lines in every department, the River Rouge plant has taken on many aspects of a community in which martial law has been declared and in which a huge military organization, whose voice is final, has been superimposed upon the regular civil authorities."