Word: sit-down
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Fortnight ago negotiations to end the great 1937 automobile labor war broke down when the United Automobile Workers failed to evacuate its sit-down strikers from two General Motors plants in Flint (TIME, Jan. 25). The fighting in Michigan having bogged down into trench warfare, the active front shifted last week to Washington. Thither went Michigan's Governor Frank Murphy, as he had planned to go anyhow to attend Franklin Roosevelt's inaugural. Thither went General Motors' President Alfred P. Sloan Jr. and Executive Vice President William S. Knudsen, thither Homer Martin, president of the striking union...
...brawl," he announced, and issued a call to the National Guard. Soon 2,300 Guardsmen were in Flint, most of them camping on the grounds and in the building of Flint's abandoned junior high school. Among the guardsmen called to the colors was one Verl Lahs, a sit-down striker in the Cadillac plant in Detroit. His fellow strikers voted to excuse him from sit-down duty because of their "great respect for law and order and the Michigan National Guard." The Guardsmen spent their time at the high school scrubbing floors and standing by, for the violence...
...their respective limbs, for in justice's sake General Motors cannot recognize the United Automobile Workers as the sole voice for its employees, nor dare labor, egged on by John Lewis and the C.I.O., back away from its extreme demands. The perfect efficiency of the sit-down method has achieved a disheartening deadlock: a minority of the workers have the power and the arrogance to ask for a representation plan to which they are in no way entitled...
...lead his United Mine Workers in a strike against the nation's soft coal operators, few observers believed that he would also risk a head-on clash with great G. M. Hence there was reason last week to believe U. A. W. assertions that the burgeoning G. M. sit-down strikes were, at least in part, spontaneous outbursts of old grievances against G. M. labor policies...
...President William S. Knudsen shot back a flat refusal, insisting that bargaining must be by individual plants. Furthermore, declared stocky, blunt-spoken Mr. Knudsen: "Sit- downs are strikes. Such strikers are clearly trespassers and violators of the law of the land. We cannot have bona fide collective bargaining with sit-down strikers in illegal possession of plants. Collective bargaining cannot be justified if one party, having seized the plant, holds a gun at the other party's head...