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Rising Prices and the Little Steel Formula
With so much of America's production going to the military,
shortages of consumer goods developed at a time when many people had
money for the first time in years. Despite government efforts to
cool the consumer economy prices began to soar. In many communities,
especially in and around aircraft factories and war plants, housing
shortages became critical and rent became outrageous. In crowded
defense town, stories were heard of beds in rooming houses and
apartments rented by the shift, with a night shift worker crawling
between still warm sheets as a day shift workers left for the plant.
Rising rents and prices ate away the purchasing power of
worker dollars and unions had no alternative but to insist on wage
increases to offset rising living costs. After months of
deliberation the War Labor Board came to grips with this issue in a
bargaining impasse involving steel producers collectively know as
"Little Steel." The Little Steel formula recognized that
rising prices justified wage adjustments, but limited inequity
increases to no more than 15% of the January, 1941 wage rate.
During the war years almost every single IAM family regularly
bought War Bonds and every issue of the Journal carried such
exhortations as "For Victory and Peace Buy U.S. War Savings
Bonds and Stamps Now!" Despite long hours of overtime on the
job, many IAM members served as neighborhood air raid wardens.
Almost everyone had someone--a son, daughter, brother, father, or
close relative--in uniform in one or more of the theaters of
operation. The patriotism of America's workers was self-evident. And
yet tensions and frustrations sometimes boiled over into strikes and
near strikes.
The IAM and the War Labor Board
When the War Labor Board (WLB) was created in January, 1942,
IAM leaders quickly recognized that the rules of the game had been
changed: for the duration the WLB would be a party to every
agreement negotiated between labor and management. T assure the IAM
members received the best possible representation in Board
proceedings, the Executive Council decided to train certain staff
members to handle WLB cases in the twelve cities with regional
boards. A carefully selected group of GLR's and special reps were
brought to Grand Lodge and put through a cram course in preparation
of WLB cases. Through out the war they assisted business reps, GLR's
and local lodge officers in presenting wage cases.
As an organization with many skilled craftsmen, relatively few
IAM members worked at substandard wages when the war began. This
meant the IAM had more difficulty than other unions in justifying
wage increases under the Little Steel Formula. In 1943, however, the
board ruled that wage adjustments would be permitted if they were
necessary "to the effect prosecution of the war." Both
before and after the 1943 interpretation the IAM's WLB
representatives fought to maintain equity for IAM members.
The WLB's final postwar report showed that the IAM brought
more cases than any other union--more the 8,000 altogether. These
included some of the largest cases handled by the board, such as one
affecting 56,000 Consolidated-Vultee employees in plants at Ft.
Worth, Nashville, Allentown, New Orleans, Miami, Elizabeth City and
Tucson. In another noted case involving 42,000 IAM members at
Curtiss-Wright plants in Buffalo, St. Louis and Louisville the
record filled more than 4,000 pages.
WLB work was in addition to cases handled by IAM reps before
the NLRB and other government agencies. A few months after the
Japanese surrendered, the Journal reported that during the
war years IAM reps filed an average of one NLRB case a day.
Protest March in Seattle
In January, 1943 a monstrous mass meeting of IAM members at
Boeing erupted into a spontaneous march protesting repeated WLB
delays in long-promised wage adjustments. The officers called the
meeting to give a progress report on the Board's long awaited
decision. Separate meetings were planed for the different shifts,
but so many members left the plant to come to the first meeting the
production line had to be shut down.
Some 15,000 agitated IAM members crammed into every corner of
the large specially-rented hall to hear a report from the directing
business representative (and later GVP), Harold Gibson. In a
carnival spirit someone made a motion from the floor to march on
City Hall. Clad in white coveralls, "Gibby" led 15,000
flag, placard and banner carrying Machinists in an impromptu parade
through the streets of downtown Seattle. When hizzoner the mayor
looked out of his third floor window he saw the largest
demonstration in Seattle history, with traffic blocked in all
directions. City Hall was surrounded by Machinists as far as the eye
could see.
After the mayor made some friendly and properly sympathetic
remarks Gibson called upon everyone to return to work--which they
did. Although the crowd was good natured and orderly the press
denounced the demonstration as sabotage, sensationalizing it in
flaming headlines from coast to coast. From Washington a desk-bound
Air Force general added his two cents worth of inflammatory rhetoric
with a wire to Gibson characterizing the protest as near treason. In
his return wire Gibson told the general where he could go. The War
Labor Board got the message. The award finally handed down for the
Boeing workers broke the Little Steel formula ceiling for the first
and only time.
Slowdowns and Strikes in San Francisco
Throughout the war members of Local 68 outraged public opinion
with a series of strikes and slowdowns affecting war production.
Lodge 68's business representatives were Harry Hook and the Ed
Dillon who had challenged Wharton and the Executive Council at the
1936 Grand Lodge Convention. Oldtimers recall Hook as a talkative,
two-fisted tough who could belly up to the bar with the best. His
sidekick Dillon was a loner, a non-smoking, non-drinking,
church-going bachelor who seemed to have no friends or interests
outside the union hall. When Dillon mounted the rostrum at union
meetings he would slam his coat to the floor, snap his suspenders
and unleash a stream of fir-eating, boss-baiting oratory, bringing
the members to a pitch of frenzied fury. Together Hook and Dillon
were a formidable team. Hook was the muscle, Dillon the brains.
Local Lodge 68 was crucial to the war effort in San Francisco
and Northern California. Its 5,000 highly skilled machinists were
not only essential to many metalworking companies in San
Francisco--the "up town shops"--but Lodge 68's maintenance
machinists wee the key to uninterrupted production in so-called
"fringe shops"--can companies, sugar refineries, clothing
factories, newspapers and food processors.
Working as a team Hook and Dillon negotiated some of the
highest pay scales in the nation for San Francisco's machinists.
When West Coast shipyards began to gear up for all-out production
early in the war, Hook and Dillon got most of the employers to
accept a master contract that provided Lodge 68 members with still
better wages and benefits.
One large shipyard, Bethlehem, refused to go along. After more
than a month of futile negotiations Hook and Dillon asked for, and
received, strike sanction from the Grand Lodge. Since Bethlehem was
producing shipping bottoms critically needed at that particular
moment in history, Lodge 68's walkout set off a nationwide furor in
the press. In Washington the Senate set up a special panel headed by
a little known Senator from Missouri, Harry Truman, to investigate
the situation.
Hook and Dillon flew to Washington but the committee refused
to hear Dillon because of suspected Communist connections. According
to the Journal, Hook was given a hard time when he tried to
explain the union's position. The committee also subpoenaed Harvey
Brown and AFL President William Green. Characteristically, Green
poured gasoline on the fire by describing these working men,
striking one of America's most notoriously anti-union corporations,
as "outlaws entitled to no consideration at the hands of
organized labor."
Neither the Senate's investigation nor the committee's
browbeating was enough to get Lodge 68's members back to work. With
a crisis building in the shipyards, Roosevelt appealed directly to
Harvey Brown. Under such pressure the Executive Council withdrew the
strike sanction and ordered Lodge 68 to call off the strike. In a
highly charged meeting a majority o the members defied both the
government and the Grand Lodge, voting 385 to 370 to stay out until
Bethlehem accepted the master agreement. The strikers finally did
return to work but only reluctantly and not until they got assurance
from the federal Office of Production Management that a list of
unresolved grievances would be taken care of . And not before Emmet
Davison himself went to San Francisco to personally appeal to their
patriotism.
The walkout at Bethlehem set a pattern that continued through
the rest of the war. Hook and Dillon violated the IAM's no-strike
pledge in 1943 by pulling the pin on a company that refused to agree
to a cost-of-living escalator on the ground that it would violated
federal wage policy. Since the walkout involved production essential
to the war, the Navy eventually seized the plant, fired the strikers
and barred Hook and Dillon from the premises. The two retaliated by
announcing that no Bay Area machinist would work more than
forty-eight hours a week no matter how dire the emergency. Hook and
Dillon also advised their members to slow down with such tactics as
"spreading out" vacations. This directive came when most
plants in the area were struggling to catch up with backlogs of war
orders.
Both the War Labor Board and the Executive Council ordered
Hook and Eillon to drop the ban on overtime, but they thumbed their
noses at the government and the Council. The FBI was brought in to
investigate reports of members harassed for defying "arrogant
union bosses." As expected, adverse findings were extensively
reported and widely circulated in the press. Ultimately the Navy
seized 102 metalworking plants in San Francisco area. Other federal
agencies mopped up remaining resistance by applying penalties
developed a year earlier against striking coal miners. Workers who
refused overtime were fired an blacklisted from wartime industries,
had their gasoline ration cards lifted and often found their draft
status reclassified. Lodge 68's closed shop certifications were
cancelled.
Temporarily beaten, Hook and Dillon warned employers they
would return after the war. When the showdown cam in 1946, Hook and
Dillon were ready to act as a law unto themselves. In addition to
the employers they took on Harvey Brown and the Executive Council, a
mistake that proved to be their undoing.
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