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Cauldron. Rare news last week was a move toward industrial peace, made when Remington Rand's hard-boiled President James H. Rand Jr., after defying a National Labor Relations Board order to reinstate and bargain with 4,000 of his employes who have been on strike since last May (TIME, March 22), visited Secretary of Labor Perkins in Washington and worked out a settlement with which she announced herself "extremely well pleased." Less pleased with Mr. Rand's terms, the strike leaders pondered, postponed acceptance. Elsewhere in the seething cauldron of U. S. Labor old and new sit-downs and walkouts continued to splash up and vanish in a constant boil.
There were some 60 in Chicago, with the taxicab strike continuing to provide most fireworks. A printers' strike stopped Indianapolis' newspaper presses for over 24 hours. Eleven nearby towns were darkened and service on three interurban lines halted when the Indiana Railroad's shop men and powerhouse walked out. Dead locked with C.I.O. over a demand for more pay, managers of twelve of the big gest downtown department and 5¢ & 10¢ stores in Providence moved to forestall sit-downs by suddenly shutting up shop at the height of Saturday and pre-Easter buying, locking out their 5,000 employes.
A C.I.O. call for a general strike of all ex cept food and drug stores closed a total of 95 of the city's 1,400 stores. A gen eral strike in the hosiery plants in and around Reading pushed the Philadelphia area's sit-down total above 20. Strongly-unionized New York City was lightly touched by the fever. Determined to stamp it out before it could get a start, police arrested 60 sit-downers in Brook lyn's Jewish Hospital for ''endangering the lives of patients," 100 in a Woolworth 5¢ & 10¢ store for "disorderly conduct." Detroit, where the Sit-Down epidemic began, remained its seething centre, and Detroiters last week were getting an idea of what a revolution feels like. Timid housewives laid in siege supplies of food from neighborhood stores, being afraid to venture downtown. Guests at the big Statler Hotel got the shock of their lives when cooks, waitresses, bellboys, chambermaids and elevator operators, conventionally as dumb and docile as the hotel furniture, impertinently sprawled down in lobbies and lounges, left them littered with cigaret butts and wastepaper, refused to serve food, carry bags, make beds, man elevators. Smelling trouble, managers of the Book-Cadillac, Detroit-Leland and Fort Shelby tried to lock out the bulk of their employes, but a flying squad of would-be sit-downers crashed the Book-Cadillac, one pistol shot being fired in the scrimmage.
Governor Murphy soon settled the hotel strikes, persuading both sides to submit to arbitration. But uppity bellboys were the least of the earnest Governor's troubles last week. Nullifying the courts, Governor Murphy had averted bloodshed in the General Motors strike, helped bring a peaceful settlement, made himself a national hero. But he had also taught sit-downers that they could safely defy the law, and last week they were showing that they had learned their lesson well.