In recent weeks the six-month strike at the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co.'s big plant in West Allis, Wis. had worn thin.* A back-to-work campaign had drawn about 3,000 of the approximately 10,000 workers into the plant, past the small groups of pickets of the Communist-led Local 248 of the C.I.O. United Automobile Workers. A-C's up-from-office-boy President Walter Geist (TIME, June 10) was winning with his strategy of playing for time. (Strikes in five other Allis-Chalmers plants had been settled with the hallowed 18½¢ wage increase, but without the union shop which Local 248 insists on.)
Last week, after A-C had again broken off negotiations, Local 248's President Robert Buse (a crony of many an avowed Communist in Wisconsin) tried a desperate maneuver. Violating a court injunction, he threw about 800 pickets in massed formation in front of some of the plant's gates. The stage was set for violence. On four afternoons pickets and cops stood toe-to-toe and slugged it out. Clothes were torn off, nonstrikers' cars tipped over. About 5,000 people, many of them high-school kids, came out to the Milwaukee suburb and joined in the fray; many of them threw rocks, tomatoes, oranges and paint bombs at pickets, workers and cops alike.
Violence was a two-way strategy. For the union it stirred another move by Labor Secretary Lew Schwellenbach to bring union and company together this week. For Walter Geist, who is evidently determined to break Local 248's grip on the plant, it gave accent to his contention of "irresponsible leadership" in the union. One of the sourest labor disputes in the country had gone bitter again.
*Among current strikes, it is the nation's third longest. The strike at J. I. Case Co.'s plant in nearby Racine is four months older; that of Mack Truck Manufacturing Corp. workers in New Jersey and Pennsylvania is three days older.