INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT IN U.S.A.

Wairarapa Times-Age, 3 April 1941, Page 4

INDUSTRIAL CONFLICT IN U.S.A.

A LTHOUGH it has been emphasised that only a comparatively small part of the vast industrial organisation of the United States has been affected by the numerous strikes reported of late, these interruptions in the smooth running of industry are from any standpoint serious. They must in some degree cut down production in defence and other industries and they seem to be tending at present to increase in numbers and in bitterness. Apart from any question of economy or war production involved, it is evidently not creditable to the world’s largest democracy that such conflicts between strikers and police as have been reported of late should continue.

One line of approach to the problems involved appears in the proposal put forward in a Bill by a Californian member of Congress (Mr T. F. Ford) that strikes “against the United States or in defence industries” should be put “in the category of treason, punishable by 25 years’ imprisonment, or by death if a strike cause fatalities.” It is most unlikely that proposals of this kind will win much support. The scale and virulence of current industrial strife in the United States points clearly, however, to the necessity, not only of giving heed to action by enemy agents or dupes, but of taking stock of industrial relationships generally.

While there is not much doubt that foreign and subversive agencies are doing a good deal at present to unsettle and disturb American industry, it is also a material fact that industrial organisation, as it bears on relationships between employers and employed, is much less developed in the United States than it is, for example, in British countries. Though the right to engage in collective bargaining is now established under the law of the United States, it is still being opposed bitterly by many American employers engaged in and controlling large sections of industry.

This aspect of the situation has been given prominence in some recent Congressional and other reports. In a report to the Senate, for example, the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee has stated that the bloody and violent “little steel” strike of 1937 resulted from law violations by the companies involved and that “the nation cannot, tolerate such conduct in its current total defence effort.” Violence during the strike mentioned, which caused nearly a score of deaths, cannot be attributed, the committee declares, to any concerted campaign of violence on the part of the union. It affirms that riots were traced to the biased or intemperate conduct of the local law enforcement authorities, and adds significantly that “all the fatalities in these riots were on the side of the strikers.”

In an official and possibly more dispassionate report to Congress, quoted in a cablegram on Tuesday, it was stated that 23 out of 73 strikes in defence industry were called solely over union recognition or jurisdiction, while 21 hinged on wages and working conditions and the remainder involved both issues.

Whatever the relative part played by enemy saboteurs and other subversive elements, in disturbing American defence industry, it seems to be indisputable that the continued and bitter opposition of .powerful employing interests to the establishment and recognition of collective bargaining is an underlying, serious and perennial cause of industi ial unrest. In Britain, with the principle of collective bargaining fully established. Organised labour has voluntarily set aside its privileges for the time being in the interests of a united war eflort. In the United States, to say the least, a much less satisfactory state 01. all airs exists.