"Labor," observed Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s President Eugene Grace as he opened a new $20,000,000 strip & sheet mill at Lackawanna, N. Y. last week, "is paramount in all our minds today."
Last week American Iron & Steel Institute, representing 95% of the nation's steelmasters, took full-page advertisements in some 375 newspapers to repeat its declaration of war against Labor's drive to organize its historically unorganized workers (TIME, July 6). From over 100 organizers put in the field by the Steel Workers Organizing Committee went reports and charges that the war had already begun.
Workers who joined the union, said they, were being dismissed. Steel superintendents were exhorting their men to stand by their company unions. Workers were being forced to sign petitions against the organization drive. An organizer had been run out of Steubenville, Ohio. Steel plants were importing gunmen, storing up "veritable arsenals."
"This is not a strike." cautioned anxious Secretary of Labor Perkins. "The Iron & Steel Institute seems to be several steps ahead of the program. I hope they will not do anything foolish and against the public interest themselves. I hope they do not get nervous and panicky."
"It is the purpose of the Committee for Industrial Organization," stated that body, "to conduct this campaign in a perfectly legal manner. . . . The Committee desires to avoid industrial strife and disturbance or violence of any character."
This pacific declaration was supplemented by an ominous growl from the Committee's potent leader. John Llewellyn Lewis: "If the steel industry insists on a fight we have no alternative but to meet them. I should judge that they would do just that thing. They always have."
On the brink of what many an observer thought promised to become a historic industrial war, Industrial Unionist Lewis also moved closer last week to a show-down in his struggle with President William Green & fellow craft unionists of the American Federation of Labor.
Leader Lewis and the heads of the nine industrial unions joined with his United Mine Workers in the Committee for Industrial Organization were summoned to appear before the A. F. of L. Executive Council this week on charges, punishable by suspension of their A. F. of L. charters, of attempting to set up a rival labor organization. Far from knuckling under, Committee for Industrial Organization leaders welcomed into their fellowship the stripling United Rubber Workers and United Auto Workers unions, announced that organizational drives in the rubber, automobile and textile indus tries would be pushed simultaneously with the steel campaign. As individuals they proclaimed their refusal to answer the A. F. of L. summons.
As a body they contemptuously dismissed the demand by declaring it "inconceivable that the Executive Council would commit any act to split the labor forces of America in the midst of the campaign in the iron and steel indus try and in the face of the arrogant ultimatum issued to the entire labor movement by the American Iron and Steel Institute." R, L P. At week's end the steel campaigners repaired for inspiration to the scene of the first great battle between U. S. steelmasters and U. S. steelmakers.