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Show by JameS Preston Nobody knows for sure what the future holds as far as strikes in defense industries are concerned. Hut Washington is sure that whatever what-ever happens will be as important us any other single piece of news that breaks during the months lying immediately ahead. One school of thought holds that strikes will ease off in the near future, apparently taking heart from the efforts of the new Mediation Media-tion board. Another school suspects sus-pects there will be a decided increase. in-crease. They bane this In part upon their feeling that the CIO will try to anticipate an expected "crackdown" "crack-down" by strengthening Itself with as many new members as possible possi-ble a little after the fashion of the fellow who drove his car at 60 miles an hour because he wanted to get home before he ran out of gas ! February, it stood at 82; in March it was 94; and during the first week of April, it had reached the astonishing figure of 125 disputes for the week! These particular statistics can hardly give much support to those who see the strike picture as roseate. No more encouraging was a recent war department statement state-ment that about one million man-hours man-hours of work had been lost on defense de-fense contracts for army orders ; alone between the first of the !year and March 24! I Many sincerely interested in 1 seeing the defense program move 'ahead would like, too, to know a I little more about the basic philosophy philo-sophy of the new Mediation board. History - minded Washingtonians recall that the mediation board set up to handle labor disputes at the time of the World War had pretty clearly articulated ideas on the standards that should prevail at such a time. They ran something some-thing like this: 1. No individual or group should seek to take advantage of abnormal conditions to make changes in basic relationship that couldn't be achieved in normal times. Only time will tell for sure. But It ought to be pointed out that some optimists may be drawing far too swooping conclusions from those first Mediation board settlements settle-ments and the wide attendant publicity. pub-licity. Most experts are inclined to believe be-lieve that a much better barometer can be found at the U. S. Conciliation Concilia-tion Service, headed by Dr. John It. Steelman. Dr. Steelman's division di-vision regularly issues figures on the number of labor disputes to which conciliators have been assigned, as-signed, and they tell a graphic and disturbing story. Here are the figures: fig-ures: Back in September of last year, conciliators were assigned to disputes dis-putes at the rate of 54 a week. In January, the figure rose to 68; in 2. No man should be forced to join a union iu order to hold his job. 3. There should be no strikes or lockouts In defense industries. It is felt that the majority of the new board holds no such principles, prin-ciples, and that in certain cases there is a widely different individual indivi-dual approach to the strikes-in-defense problem. Ultimately, results re-sults will tell the tale. Meanwhile, observers are concerned. Encouraging, on the other hand, are some of the accomplishments of industry in defense work in spite of the obstacles and uncertainty uncer-tainty surrounding it on every side. It has just been announced, for example, that 1,215 airplanes were turned out in March. To point up the meaning of that volume vol-ume of production, officials point out that the operating equipment of all American airlines the best equipped in the world totals only about 400 planes. And the horsepower of the engines en-gines manufactured in March, they tell us, would be enough to run 79 ocean liners the size of the S. S. America, with enough power left over to run 12 9 cabs to carry passengers to the pier! The complexity of some of the defense manufacturing tasks may be adduced from a few simple facts on tanks: The transmission alone of a single medium sized tank weighs 7,608 pounds, or about twice the total weight of an entire medium sized automobile. An. entire medium sized tank weighs about 55,000 pounds. And it would take one man about 1,000 hours just to build that transmission ! As one high defense official remarked, "I don't know why they ever called those babies medium-sized!" medium-sized!" Maybe it was because of a feeling feel-ing that industry can lick far more than its weight in tough production produc-tion problems like these! |