The Frontier

LABOR:
Seek Peace

Armed with emergency powers, Secretary of Labor Lewis Schwellenbach moved into the troubled industrial front, where CIO demands for appreciable wage boosts threatened to retard the reconversion program and jeopardize stabilization policy.

Schwellenbach faced no easy task, what with the strategic oil, automobile, farm equipment and steel unions striving for wage readjustments to bring 40-hour-a-week pay up to wartime overtime levels, and major producers bucking the demands in the face of rigid price control.

In all instances, CIO demands for substantial wage boosts were predicated on the claim that the big companies had made sizable wartime profits and could use the money to defray part of the increases until peacetime production could be reestablished on a volume basis.

While oil workers already had walked out of midwest refineries in a strike that threatened to spread and imperil the national fuel supply, principal interest continued to center in the troubled automobile situation, where the United Automobile Workers headed by R. J. Thomas laid plans for enforcing their demands for a 30 per cent wage increase by walking out on individual companies and leaving their competitors free to invade their markets.

In assuming command of a labor department strengthened by the inclusion of the War Labor board, war manpower commission and United States employment service, Secretary Schwellenbach planned to proceed slowly before exerting emergency powers, first exhausting ordinary procedure.