The steel industry last week was operating at 36.4% of capacity. Steel scrap, which accounts for nearly one-half of new steel, sold for almost $22 a ton in April, was down last week to $13.41. These melancholy facts trouble everyone in the junk business.* In Chicago the junk business is especially troubled, for retail junk shop owners for the last two months have been having trouble with the men who collect and sell them their scrap. About 1,500 junkmen, members of the United Junk Peddlers’ Association—a C. I. O. affiliate —struck against the retailers for union recognition and a closed shop. Retailers promptly had peddler pickets clapped in jail. Chicago’s Judge Michael Feinberg refused an injunction to restrain the police, told the junkmen they were not employes but independent merchants and not covered by the Wagner Act. So last week junkmen began organizing a co-operative junk yard to ignore both wholesalers and retailers and sell direct to the mills. Hurt, the wholesaling members of Chicago’s local Metal Institute retired to St. Joseph, Mich., to hear Milton Silverstein keynote their convention on “Playing the Game.”
Meantime in Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Junk Peddlers’ Union, with 150 members who would like to join C. I. O. but say they cannot afford the dues, donated $50 to the Chicago strike, prepared to demand that the city keep children and organized charities from cutting in on their business. Said Harry Morgenstein, the union’s business agent: “If the country doesn’t want the families of about 300 junk collectors on relief, something will have to be done to stop this unfair competition from organizations like the Salvation Army. . . .”
*Scrap dealers consider it an insult to be called junkmen, have their own national trade body, the Institute of Scrap Iron & Steel, Inc. Nonspecialist dealers who are equally touchy are organized in the National Association of Waste Materials Dealers, Inc.
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