National Affairs: Skirmishes

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New York's LaGuardia Airport had the kind of strike that makes the bystanding public tear its hair out by handfuls.

Maintenance workers walked out of American Airlines hangars, set up picket lines, had a brief clash with police, soon were joined by sympathy strikers in the American Airlines shops in Chicago and Detroit. For a full day American Airlines had to abandon its 24 flights in & out of Chicago and 22 other flights in & out of Detroit.

If the Chicago and Detroit workers knew what they were striking about, they knew more than the public. Newsmen, trying to thread through a tangled skein of fact, discovered that four unions claimed jurisdiction over the mechanics, that three had invoked a National Media tion Board election, the other an NMB mediator. Almost lost in the tangle was a rejected company wage offer which would hardly remind most onlookers of the sweatshop—as much pay for a peacetime 40-hour week as for a wartime 48-hour week, plus an average increase of about 10% to boot.

Other labor developments:

¶In a long and indignant letter to theUnited Steelworkers, Vice President John Stephens of the U.S. Steel Corp. turned down the union's demand for a $2-a-day increase, claiming that the company was already selling many products below cost, that it was "sheer nonsense" to suggest that the company could absorb a higher wage level without raising prices. Thereupon the Steelworkers' Philip Murray accused the steel industry of "arrogance," called for a strike vote among 640,000 employes of 766 companies.

¶ Auto workers voted for strikes by 6-to-1 at General Motors and 8-to-1 at (Chrysler in elections required by the Smith-Connally Act.

¶ James C. Petrillo, ingenious czar of the American Federation of Musicians, outdid himself in a new dispute with the radio networks: when stations broadcast a musical program over regular channels and FM at the same time, he ruled they will have to hire a second orchestra to stand by.

¶Trainmen on Chicago's elevated lines, piqued because the company sent out retroactive pay rise checks to its white-collar workers before getting round to them, snarled traffic all afternoon with a work stoppage which was called as "proof our union will preserve its dignity."

¶ At Des Moines' Iowa Packing Co., one H. Shapiro, a veteran who wanted to return as an 83f^-an-hour sausage stuffer instead of going back to his job as a 74^-an-hour check sealer, provided a test case for his union. After a four-day strike of 1,000 workers, the union won its demand that returning servicemen receive all promotions granted to colleagues in their absence.