Did Shakespeare write musical shows? The answer seemed to rest last week with James Caesar Petrillo, who never got beyond the fifth grade. To the producers, Broadway’s current The Tempest (TIME, Feb. 5) is a play by William Shakespeare with incidental music by David Diamond. To Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, it is “a musical show because of the amount of music in it, and we don’t care whether it is by Shakespeare or by Joe Doakes.”
If 802 is right. The Tempest’s producers must employ at least 16 musicians (its music is scored for twelve) at $92 instead of $65 a week—”or we’ll close the show.” Indignantly, the producers appealed to Petrillo, 802’s national boss.
Meat for Caesar. Probably they would get no more satisfaction than did Minneapolis radio station KSTP, which succumbed last week to the uncompromising czar of American music, after fighting a rear-guard action against him for ten months. KSTP agreed to hire a minimum of eight musicians (at minimum wages of $52 apiece for a 22-hour week), which is more musicians than the station needs.
The row began when the Minneapolis musicians’ local opened negotiations for a new contract by insisting that KSTP hire a minimum of eight staff musicians, three record turners. The dispute went to the War Labor Board. While awaiting a decision, the station got a restraining order to forestall a strike threat. Petrillo met that by ordering a strike, which worked. The Minneapolis court issued a warrant for Petrillo’s arrest, which did not work: he stayed out of Minneapolis.
Neither the War Labor Board, which ordered the striking musicians to return to work, nor American Federation of Labor President William Green, who repudiated the strike, could move cocky, stocky Caesar Petrillo. The case was a test of his policy of establishing his own quotas of musicians for individual radio stations. Caesar won the test.
The Remedy? Said KSTP President Stanley E. Hubbard last week: “Petrillo has demonstrated to the world that he has more power [than the War Labor Board]. . . . We therefore have capitulated . . . to his demands that we employ men under contract regardless of whether or not we need them. . . . The remedy to this situation lies in the legislative branch of our government. . . .”
Such a remedy was proposed in Congress last week. Oklahoma’s Almer Stillwell Mike Monroney introduced a bill to prohibit union make-work practices by subjecting unions to prosecution under the antitrust laws. Harried employers, of musicians and other union workers, heard the news with restrained gratification. It was a long jump from introducing a bill to getting it enacted into a law. The labor lobbies would fight to the last man against the Monroney bill.
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