LABOR: Strikeless Strike

One afternoon last week, members of C. I. O.’s Utility Workers Organizing Committee in the Zilwaukee, Mich, plant of the Consumers Power Co. calmly evicted the superintendent and sundry non-C. I. O. workers, manned the gates to the plant and announced they were on strike.

During the course of the evening, the same procedure was repeated in half-a-dozen distributing stations of Consumers Power, a subsidiary of Commonwealth & Southern Corp. By morning, the switches controlling current for 1,000,000 consumers in the highly industrialized Saginaw Valley were completely under the control of the C. I. O. union.

That the “strikers” did not pull the switches but instead carried on as usual without benefit of outside management was at once relieving and disturbing. Here was a strike that was not a strike: the “strikers” were working and the product was being produced. (Whether or not the “strikers” expected to be paid for working while striking was not clear.) Unintentionally, militant Michigan Labor had, in effect, provided an object lesson in bloodless revolution.

The cause of this portentous prospect was a dispute as to whether an expired contract guaranteeing no wage reductions should be extended for three months or for one year as the union demanded. Early this week Michigan’s Governor Frank Murphy, who knows how to remain calm under labor fire, deposited the contending parties in separate hotel rooms and, after seven consecutive hours of shuttling back & forth, the union agreed to call off the “revolution” in exchange for a four-month extension.