Spring Offensive

Led by Howard Smith, Carl Vinson, Thurman Arnold, and Ralph Bard, the anti-labor stampede would seem to revolve around the issue against the 40-hour week and the closed shop. Actually, it is much more than that. It is an extremely clever and back-handed attempt to kill Philip Murray's labor-management plan. These men who have been waging an "undeclared war" against labor on the floor of Congress and in the pages of the daily press are like scheming murderers who start a row in one part of town to cover up their real crime in another part.

Ever since Reuther's labor-management committees proved successful in converting the automobile industry into defense plants, Philip Murray has been plugging to have the same system used in all defense industries. And, on March 2, Donald Nelson said we would have to raise our war output 25 per cent, and that he favored the Murray plan as one way to do it. Then, on March 8, management got its chance to kill the Murray plan. On that day, the New Jersey CIO declared that the Jersey war plants were utilizing "only 49 per cent of their productive capacity," mainly because industry had failed "to use the second and third shift."

The anti-laborites twisted this criticism of management into a Congressional stampede which was to draw all attention away from the Murray plan. They took the fact that New Jersey was producing at 51 per cent below capacity because the factories were not working on the second and third shift, and came out with the tremendous lie that the fault lay in the 40-hour-a-week law. If labor would work more than 40 hours a week, and if there weren't so many hours lost on strikes, then Nelson would get all the production he wanted, they said. And they got politicians to go to work for them in Congress. Then the lines began to form, the sparks to fly. Roosevelt, Nelson, Knudsen, Patterson, Biddle, Perkins all came out strongly for labor and against any legislation. The lie, which had been created to cloud the Murray plan now turned into an attack against the New Deal in general, reminiscent of the last days of the 1940 presidential campaign.

There probably won't be any anti-labor legislation, because three-fifths of the defense laborers are averaging 46 hours to the week; two-thirds of the war plants are operating more than 160 out of a possible 168 hours per week; and the strikes were so few that 99.97 per cent of the working hours were completed during January and February. But the anti-laborites have achieved their original purpose: they have temporarily smothered a spread of the Murray plan. They have also smothered Roosevelt's hopes that management would cooperate with labor without being forced.