The Poplar Standard

LEWIS:

A Fine Largess

John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America—a labor union which does not pay its members strike benefits and which subjects them to untold misery and hardship during strike periods—was offering a victory-flushed one-million-dollar loan to the C.I.O. United Automobile Workers union.

The purpose of the loan would be to help the UAW win new contracts from Chrysler and General Motors. Lewis wrote Walter Reuther, head of the giant auto workers union, that wage-welfare improvements in the coal industry were fought by money interests linked with the financial group which dominates car-making.

He added that this aid is needed so your union may be assured beyond preadventure, of success in its present struggle. Reuther was in the midst of a long strike for pensions at Chrysler corporation.

At the time of Lewis' offer, it was estimated UAW workers had lost 35 million dollars in pay and the company 250 million dollars.

Help for Reuther was authorized at a jubilant meeting of Lewis with his top union aides, where Lewis was said to have boasted that he had licked the strike-emergency injunction provision of the Taft-Hartley law, inasmuch as a federal court injunction issued under the law failed to halt the coal strike.

Most of the big U.S. industrial concerns feared that Lewis' victory over the coal operators in the matter of wage increases and additional health and welfare benefits would touch off a series of strikes as other unions sought to do as well for themselves.

Coal was being mined again and industry's wheels were turning, but the immediate future appeared grim and uncertain. The question seemed to be: When and where will the next strike erupt? It seemed inevitable to even a casual observer that another round of wage-hike fights was in the making.