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Show shows that it has always tried to dominate its labor force. At first it formed company unions. When the Wagner Act cut the ground from under that tactic, it sought to divide the unions and fragmentize them. And it is now using the present labor crisis as a chance ... of breaking break-ing up industry-wide collective bargaining. Make no mistako about it: the AT&T position in this strike is the first battle in an all-out campaign to smash unionism by splitting the unions into tiny and helpless bargaining units. What makes this all the more galling is that it is being done by a corporation whose own tight-knit monopoly over its whole industry is one of the marvels of an age of monopoly. "There is no way to meet this challenge except by meeting it. . . . You cannot solve a labor crisis by court action as long as the roots of the crisis are not dealt with. . . The roots of the crisis are steadily rising living costs . . . The refusal of the big corporations to share their profit - prosperity with their workers. They are the enormous enor-mous power which we have allowed al-lowed a small group of men to concentrate in a public utility under a private dictatorship. "The way to deal with the labor problem is to deal with these root problems underlying it. There are no short-cuts to by-pass the fact that American workers are human beings and cannot be run on the automatic dial system." Max Lerner in The Newspaper PM. i ! Milford Valley's citizens j really know very little about I the telephone strike, except ' that it's darned inconvenient. ' Naturally, there are two sides i to the story. The 'phone com-i com-i puny has presented some of their proposals in the form of j paid advertisements in this ,i newspaper. We've heard no direct representations from the strikers. Unofficially, our i spiking neighbors tell us "the I strike will be settled in the j cast"; "That chatter about a 60-odd per cent increase in wages since '41 is true, but in '41 we were making two-bits an hour" and other similar statements. We also heard Hint the A T & T at Milford completed an "emergency" ; call to secure parts for a stalled automobile, but . if I that's true we also understand that in a northern Utah city : the union officials got by for I quite a while with a policy of i completing union calls of any j nature, and refusing to handle calls for any one else unless in case of absolute emergency. A recent editorial in PM, the New York City infant daily, is quoted in part, for the benefit bene-fit of any interested readers: "The root problem of the current cur-rent strikes is the failure of our J business and political leaders to j reckon with workers as human beings, and not simply robots. ! "Behind the demand for higher high-er wages is a drastic rise in liv-j liv-j ing costs. Behind the other union demands is the fact that ' the AT&T has been accustomed to deal with its workers autocratically, auto-cratically, to expect the same submissiveness from them that it sets from dial phones, j "Collective bargaining is a ; good instrument by which the j unbalance between profits and I wages, between pay envelopes J and living costs, could be set right. But here we strike a , snag the most important fact about the whole telephone dis-, dis-, pule: the AT&T insists on changing chang-ing the rules of the game. I "The rules are that where management has industry-wide controls, the union bargains with it on an industry-wide basis. . . . i The company's argument is, of course, that the subsidiaries are separate operating units. Thai may be, but they are not sep-' sep-' arate control units. The same small group of men run all of them, all over the country- And i it is the control that counts. "I doubt whether AT&T is an ' innocent in this jockeying for : position. It has shown itself thruout its history as one of the slickest of the big corporations in America, if not the very slickest. It is organized as a complete dictatorship, with con trol over subsidiaries, patents workers, stockholders, consumers. consum-ers. It is run by one man at the head of a self-perpetuating oligarchy. oli-garchy. It has built itself on the principal of never sharing power with anyone else. ". . . The story of the AT&T |