For the first time ever a New Deal labor board finally got its courage up, last week recognized that there are such things as bad, irresponsible unions. In a revolutionary decision covering 32,000 workers in ten Aluminum Co. of America plants scattered from Edgewater, N.J. to Vernon, Calif., President Roosevelt's pet WLB granted "maintenance of membership" (a modified closed shop) in nine plants, brusquely denied it in the huge 7,000-man factory in Cleveland.
WLB carefully sidestepped specific reason for its drastic action, only admitted "unsatisfactory relations" in Cleveland. But Washington dopesters said WLB's stilted phrase was verbal whitewash to cover a nasty situation, pointed to paragraph No. 6 of the Board's decision, which orders official observers to the Cleveland plant at once.
Turmoil. Whatever WLB's eyers wind up with, most Clevelanders know the local Alcoa situation inside out: for years the vast, high-fenced plant sprawled along Harvard Avenue has been a turmoil of union drives, union lawsuits, strikes, riots. Marching pickets, yelping organizers and busy leaflet distributors have been around the plant so often that the place looks deserted when they are gone. The union has organized and reorganized, but a few union bigwigs have been around a long time.
One such is smart, red-haired Edward T. Cheyfitz (who named his little son John Lewis), at 28 one of the youngest members of C.I.O.'s potent executive board. Cheyfitz started unioneering after a trip to Russia in 1933, helped organize the National Association of Die Casting Workers, of which he is now national secretary. Superactive in Toledo union affairs, Cheyfitz was named in Dies Committee reports. Then he went to Cleveland and things began to pop. Slowdowns and strikes became the order of the week in Alcoa's plants; production sagged.
First real blow-off came in June 1941 when the union and the company argued over still higher wages and most of the workers walked out on $60,000,000 in defense orders. The Cleveland News ran a picture of Cheyfitz on page one, flatly accused him of starting the strike. Snarled the News: "He is a regular member of Communist caucuses." The reliable Plain Dealer also blamed Cheyfitz for most of the trouble, cited a Dies report that he was "active in the bloody [Electric] Auto-Lite strike in Toledo in 1934."
Quiet. However rambunctious in the past, Cheyfitz gave not one peep after WLB's jolting decision. But his old sidekick, tough, grim-faced Alex Balint sounded off, lambasted the order as a "mistake," said that worker "morale has dropped from 100% to zero." Then the union surprised everybody, said it would not sanction any protest strike because "we fully realize it would only create disunity."