LABOR: What, Never? No, Never!

The pitch was petulant, as usual, but the lines had the lingering quality of an old torch song at midnight. "It's never, never, never," intoned James Caesar Petrillo. "That's all there is to it." And at midnight on New Year's Eve that was all there was to it.

Not a single record was cut thereafter by any one of the 216,000 members of Petrillo's American Federation of Musicians for any one of the 771 U.S. recording and transcription companies. Tired but outwardly happy, the musicians sat back to wait for Jimmy's next move. Nobody believed Jimmy's refrain, but everybody knew that...

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