LABOR: On the Dan

Only a thin plaster partition in a Danville, Va. hotel one day last week separated the persons of William Green, president of the American Federation of Labor, and Harrison Robertson Fitzgerald, president of Riverside & Dan River Mills Co. Their industrial principles, however, remained poles apart. What tied them together in the week's news were their conflicting interests in the A. F. of L.'s strike, biggest of the Depression, in Mr. Fitzgerald's Danville mills, largest and long the most peaceful of Southern textile plants. President Green conferred with strike leaders in a private parlor of the hotel while through the wall from the next room came the muffled voice of President Fitzgerald ad dressing a Rotary luncheon.

Mr. Green had journeyed to Danville to propose a partial surrender. Declaring that "the Danville strike is but an incident in the campaign to unionize the Southern cotton mills," he set 3,000 strikers & friends to lusty cheering by suggesting that they return to work in the mills and arbitrate their differences with the company afterwards. He even went so far as to suggest that either Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd or Virginia's onetime Governor Harry Flood Byrd act as public arbitrator. His prime stipulation for peace: the workers' right to remain mem bers of the A. F. of L.'s textile union.

Upon that stipulation, however, was seen the ultimate wreck of his peace offer, because Unionism had become the core of the Danville fight.

The Riverside & Dan River Mills strad dle the Dan River, are connected by covered concrete bridges. Normally the personnel numbers 4,500 operatives. President Fitzgerald, whose father was one of the company's founders, started at 17 to work in the plant. When he became its head he organized the mills into a thoroughgoing industrial "republic" with himself as president. He built a $250,000 Y. M. C. A. for his workers, supplied them with neat houses, free electricity. Because he believes that his deafness was caused by poor medical attention when he was a boy, he provided plant doctors, nurses.

Also he established what he thinks of as a "workers' congress." There was a lower house of representatives of employes and a senate made up of representatives of the foremen, overseers, second hands. Plant problems were handled in parliamentary fashion. In spite of the hard times which struck the textile business three years ago, the Fitzgerald mills maintained a wage level averaging 10% higher than any other Southern plant.

But last February a 10% "economy reduction" in wages was ordered. The workers went to Labor President Green for aid. The A. F. of L., which has yet to get a firm foothold in the South, viewed Mr. Fitzgerald's "workers' congress" as merely one more example of the hated "company union." Mr. Green eagerly sent organizers to Danville, signed up most of the Fitz gerald employes.

When the mills began dismissing union ringleaders, a strike was called Sept. 29. So well did both sides behave themselves that not until last month did the struggle begin to attract much outside attention.