Word: alcoa
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Turmoil. Whatever WLB's eyers wind up with, most Clevelanders know the local Alcoa situation inside out: for years the vast, high-fenced plant sprawled along Harvard Avenue has been a turmoil of union drives, union lawsuits, strikes, riots. Marching pickets, yelping organizers and busy leaflet distributors have been around the plant so often that the place looks deserted when they are gone. The union has organized and reorganized, but a few union bigwigs have been around a long time...
...helped organize the National Association of Die Casting Workers, of which he is now national secretary. Superactive in Toledo union affairs, Cheyfitz was named in Dies Committee reports. Then he went to Cleveland and things began to pop. Slowdowns and strikes became the order of the week in Alcoa's plants; production sagged...
Cheyfitz and his pals have enough disunity already, could hardly stand more. Besides scrapping with Alcoa and WLB (partly over a $1-a-day wage boost), the Die Casting local is fighting counter-organization drives by the powerful Aluminum Workers of America (which already controls nine Alcoa plants), and John L. Lewis' District 50 division of the United Mine Workers (which controls Alcoa's Buffalo plant). Both would like to get a pipeline into Cheyfitz' fat 7,000-man dues pot. Thus the Die Casters' "no-strike" edict was partly prompted by a desire to keep...
...Alcoa has thus come through the most serious crisis it has ever faced-its grip on aluminum practically unshaken. It has had to cut prices to 15? a lb. (v. 20? in 1937); it has taken on operating contracts for Government-owned plants for only 15% of the profits-and that means for practically nothing at all, after paying up to 94% of that 15% back to the U.S. in excess-profits taxes. But Alcoa kept its leadership in aluminum unchallenged...
After the war, however, Alcoa will face increased competition-aluminum v. steel, v. copper, v. magnesium v. plastics. Alcoa will have to find new markets for enough aluminum to rebuild all the railroad passenger cars now in the U.S. every four months, or every year to put a 30-piece set of cooking utensils in 34,000,000 U.S. homes, with enough left over for 5,000,000 miles of aluminum electric transmission cable. It will have to market more tons of metal than all the U.S. copper companies combined have ever sold in a peacetime year. At present prices...