Franklin's Big Stick

Two vital questions are involved in the strike now going on in North American Aviation's California plant. First is the necessity of breaking the jam in the production of fighting planes, the most essential element in American defense, and restoring to production the fifth of the industry which the strike has tied up. Second, but no less important, is the right of workers to bargain collectively and freely, a right which labor seemed to have secured after eight years of the New Deal. But now the same New Deal has done an about face and the President himself has proposed a program which fails utterly to solve the production and which disregards completely the rights of labor.

Taking over the management of picketed plants will not bring the workers back to the assembly line. Once it has assumed control, the Army will find itself in much the same position with regard to the strikers as do the owners now. The determination of the Union, shown at its meeting yesterday, not to be browbeaten by President Roosevelt's threat of force provides an indication of how labor all over the country will react to the presence of two battalions of infantry in the offing. If the Army takes over in Inglewood tomorrow the strike will be farther from solution than ever.

The proposed measure, which allows the owners to maintain their financial policy and only takes over the management end, appears suspiciously like a blow aimed directly at organized labor and not like an effort to bring a quick settlement to the strike. The President seems determined to us his newly won emergency powers of force to restore production. If so, he might better bring his influence to bear on N. A. A.'s prosperous owners to concede the seventy-five cent minimum wage asked by the Union than order his Army to squash the picket line. Such a move would be less liable to the cries of "Communism" which would arise on every hand than is the present proposal to charges of Fascism.