Word: merchant
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Throughout the war the Merchant Marine was the least publicized of all major services contributing to the overall effort. With post-war birth of veterans' privileges, the question of who deserved what and why has exposed the Merchant Seamen to a sustained attack from old-line veterans' organizations and from the conservative press, which would use a drive against the unpopular maritime labor organizations as an opening wedge in a drive to discredit the advances of industrial unionism. Hanson Baldwin, naval expert of the New York Times, last week traced a whole epidemic of wartime sins to the activities...
...fact is that some Merchant Seamen at the very beginning of the war were granted bonuses far out of line with the wage scales of the armed forces. These bonuses covered the trip to Murmansk, a brutal voyage, but a voyage that involved less than 10 per cent of the two hundred thousand men who were active wartime seamen. When losses on the North Atlantic dropped off, bonuses were cut, and the wage scale of the Merchant Marine, figured on an annual basis, was aligned with that of the Army and Navy so that no great difference existed...
Although you can factually disprove the contentions that Merchant Seamen were overpaid, it is much harder to gather facts about slacking, draft-dodging and the other uglier vices attributed to war-time sailors. The full story is that staying "shore-side" meant immediate drafting, which, for good or bad, is never mentioned in the current charges. Further, the purely civilian status so prized by merchant seamen passed with other myths as a ship left the pier for deep waters. At sea, in convoy or out, all men were subject to certain articles of war, articles that cover union...
...Masters, Mates and Pilots and C.I.O. Marine Engineers left most of the nation's ships just as dead in the water as they were five weeks ago when lower-crust seamen struck. Wages were not an issue; shipowners were willing to settle for boosts which would give some merchant marine captains well over $600 a month. The dispute was over the West Coast shipowners' refusal to give union members preference in hiring. While negotiators argued in Washington, ship captains in Manhattan argued among themselves, fought a battle of bottles, knives and clubs...
...great maritime strike which had immobilized the nation's merchant fleet for 17 days (TIME, Sept. 23) ended last week. James L. Fly, onetime head of the Federal Communications Commission, acting as arbitrator, engineered this settlement of the complex wage dispute: ship owners would pay the unions exactly what they had demanded. Seamen, placated, went back to work. The ships moved again...