Imperial Valley Press

News Behind the News
The Maritime Troubles

WASHINGTON.—Exchange of fire between the Maritime Commission and the National Maritime Union, featured by Chairman Joe Kennedy's "put 'em in irons" cable to the Algic's captain at Montevideo and union President Joe Curran's promise to "get Kennedy's scalp," is going to get hotter.

The two chief factors begging solution are a strong anti-union feeling among most members of the commission and its staff and a serious series of breaches of discipline, especially among stewards, in the American merchant marine.

Labor leaders don't know it yet, but they'll be hollering blue murder when the commission's report on the whole merchant marine situation is sent to Congress this month. The commission has decided that the Coast Guard should be used to train seamen, that new seamen should learn discipline on Coast Guard vessels and that subsidy contracts should require ship operators to hire the graduates.

This hits the seamen's unions right between the eyes. It would strike at their union hiring halls, where men are provided for outgoing ships, and tend to weaken if not destroy the unions.

The scheme is sure to be denounced as a "union-busting" device and reports from inside the commission indicate that some members and high officials believe, with either enthusiasm or disapproval, that it is exactly that. The dominant feeling in the commission is that labor unions, at least militant unions, have no place in the merchant marine.

Although propaganda about bad discipline at sea has been coming out of the commission lately in advance of its report, everyone concerned—sympathetic to unions or not—agrees that a bad situation has existed and that something must be done to reduce the large volume of passenger complaints.

Publicity is being given to alleged instances of the seaman who demanded hearts of lettuce instead of lettuce leaves, a crew which insisted on unloading a ship on the shady rather than the sunny side of wharf, a drunken steward who fell into a swimming pool among guests, a steward who said to a female passenger, "Get up, baby, it's time for breakfast," and so on.

The merits of the Algic case with facts bitterly disputed, will be ruled on by a federal court faced by 14 crew members who temporarily stopped work at Montevideo.

In the background is the fact that seamen whose wages were forced down as low as $25 or $30 a month and who crowded into filthy, vermin-infested quarters with bad food until many of the better ones left the sea, are now feeling their oats and releasing pent-up emotions.

But the commission is feeling its oats, too, and has hired men for key jobs who privately admit anti-union prejudice.

The question will be asked, fairly or not, why the Maritime Commission couldn't try to work with the unions, since interests of sailors are vitally bound up with good operation of American ships. There is no record that it ever has taken up any complaint with any of the unions.