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Show MERRY-GO-ROUND Lewis Keeps Organizers' Wages Down By DREW PEARSON WASHINGTON Here Is a letter from an organizer of the United Mine Workers regarding the poor wage seals paid by John I Lewis to his own union workers. work-ers. For obvious reasons, the writer of the letter, who works for Lewis' district No. 50, must remain anonymous. He writes: ""It is of great Interest to sea John L. Lewis again make wage demands of the operators, when the irony 1s that ha does not believe In handing out Increases to his own employes. The organizers organ-izers of district No. 50 have not received an Increase, in most cases since 1942. "They have received $208 a month and $5 a day for expenses. In fact they have been cut They used to get parking and tolls, but now that has been removed from them. Tet without with-out flinching his eyebrows, Lewis asks for wage increases from employers, forgetting that he, himself, Is an employer. "There is absolutely no seniority sen-iority in district No. 50. The organization or-ganization certainly needs a union more than the workers in plants to protect them' from John L. Lewis. If anything goes wrong or a mistake Is made, you get bawled out or fired without any recourse whatsoever. "We in the locale introduced resolutions at the convention in Atlantic City, and what happened hap-pened T The officers pigeon-holed them. Some -day members of district No. 50 will have to resort re-sort to picketing." Porter's Black Market Shortly Short-ly before he resigned as OP A administrator, battered Paul Porter still had sufficient sense of humor to tell this story on himself: Shortly before President Truman Tru-man announced the end of all controls on meat Porter was taking a few daya vacation on a friend's ranch In Texas. One day he accompanied the ranch foreman fore-man to watch a near-by cattle auction. The prices the steers were bringing were so high that Porter Por-ter knew the meat never could be sold at ceiling prices without terrific loss. Dressed In ranch clothes snd unknown to the crowd, he asked a near-by rancher ranch-er how any profit could be made on this beef if it were to be sold at celling prices. "What do you mean, celling prices, stranger?" the rancher asked. . "Why, the OP A maximum prices," Porter replied. "On. the O P A," chuckled the rancher. "Well, you see, we never put the OP A In fores down here." Shall We Feed Germany? The national advisory committee, commit-tee, which develops U. S. economic eco-nomic foreign 'policy, had a surprise guest speaker the other day Undersecretary of Agriculture Agri-culture N. E. Dodd. Federal Ressrve Chairman Marriner Eccles had invited him to describe de-scribe the European agricultural situation and Dodd began by telling how "shocked" he was st the possibility Germany would go hungry this winter. "Things are terrible in Germany," Ger-many," Dodd said, and then went on to state that Germany is the only country in Europe which will be hungry. His remarks were a surprise to Undersecretary of State Will Clayton, who pointed out that this did not correspond with the facts received by tha Stats department which indicated indi-cated that starvation In Greece, Italy and Czechoslovakia this winter will be as great if not greater, than last year. "I am sorry," Clayton added, "there Just Isn't enough food In the world to go around." "There's more food than we thought" Dodd replied. At this point Eccles Interrupted. Inter-rupted. "If wa. don't feed the Germans," Ger-mans," he said, "then the Russians Rus-sians wilt Besides we ought to stop sending food to countries In the Soviet zone." The debate continued, but no decision was taken on stepping up food shipments to Germany. Note For five years, while the rest of the continent starved, the Germans ate off the fat of the land. As a result of malnutrition malnu-trition in non-German areas, Hitler won at least one aspect of the war, for he wrecked Europe's Eu-rope's health. Copyright 1946, Bell Syndicate |
