The Nation's Business

This morning Americans by the millions will tune their radios to the early newscasts to learn if the telephone strike whose certainty was termed beyond the "slightest question" has become a reality, or has been staved off by an eleventh hour formula pulled from Secretary Schwellenbach's fedora. Both sides have indicated willingness to submit to arbitration the unions' demands for higher wages and pensions, longer vacations, and other fringe issues. But, only a few hours before the strike deadline, there is still a large area of disagreement as to how the arbitration should be effected, particularly if it should be on a national or local basis.

Like railroads and coal mining, the telephone industry is so essential to the nation's economy that the prospect of a lengthy strike has induced serious gastric disturbances in both Washington and Wall Street. Congressional searching for the legislative abracadabra that will keep telephone workers on the job is proceeding with the same infuriated righteousness that quashed last year's railroad strike. The pressure that the government exerted on the Railroad Brotherhoods was justified as a temporary measure. But the time for temporary measures has passed.

Business has become the nation's business. In any major industrial dispute the government has the duty of protecting the health and welfare of the nation without infringing upon labor's right to strike. Seizure or injunctions only postpone the day of decision. Even outright nationalization would only exchange one employer for another without necessarily removing the causes for labor unrest. Up to now Congress has confined its questing to drastic and eventually repressive cure-all measures, and has neglected to explore the possibilities of limited intervention in major industrial tie-ups to insure only the bare minimum of production or services essential to the public health and safety. While the problems of working out a pattern of limited intervention in strikes in essential industries or utilities is not a simple one, the results of such action offer more benefits to industry and to the nation's than could be obtained by seizing one horn of the dilemma and twisting it until something breaks.

The eventual goal of industrial harmony cannot be attained by a series of step gap measures. In many cases the issue is as much sociological as economic. Workers grow dissatisfied with their jobs because the worker has become just another handle on a machine. No legislative flat can create a system in which each worker feels that he is making a contribution to society and that he is a necessary part of the nation's life. Only through a lengthy process of trial and error methods, worked out by labor and management leaders in each plant or industry, will on acceptable pattern of industrial relationships be evolved. Nor will the goal be reached until both labor and management realize that they have responsibilities that extend beyond union members or stockholders.