Prayer Answered

Peace, as it must eventually to all disputants, came last week to Henry Ford and his striking workers. The U.S. breathed a justified sigh of relief because the great Ford plants, with their $150,000,000 in defense orders, were not going to be idle indefinitely.

For the first time in his long career. Henry Ford had agreed to negotiate with a labor union. The settlement, fruit of Governor Murray D. Van Wagoner's and U.S. Conciliator James Dewey's tireless efforts, set up a board on which top-ranking Ford men will confer with union men and public officials to adjust grievances that cannot be settled by plant committees. Ford agreed to reinstate five of the men whose dismissals precipitated a walkout at the huge Rouge plant. The union agreed to leave the cases of three others in arbitration. Both sides agreed to cooperate in an NLRB election to determine finally whether C.I.O. or A.F. of L. had a majority in the plant and" was entitled to be certified as exclusive bargaining agent.

Except for a day of rioting which resulted in a few minor injuries, some destruction of instruments and machinery, one of industry's most threatening volcanoes had subsided with little damage done. Breathed Michigan's Governor Van Wagoner: "Our prayers for peace have been answered."

Other good news came from Pittsburgh. A strike threat in U.S. Steel was removed at last when the company signed a new contract giving C.I.O. workers a 10-c--an-hour increase, following announcement of a 10-c- wage rise at both National Steel Corp. and Bethlehem Steel (see p. 82).

But there were still some subterranean blurps and rumbles. The soft-coal squabble smoldered into its fifth week and Southern operators split from the Appalachian wage conference. United Mine Workers President John L. Lewis and the Northerners had reportedly agreed on a new wage rate of $7 a day, but Southern operators refused to budge from their offer of $6.21. Reopening of Northern mines, strike-shut for two weeks, would return two-thirds of the nation's soft-coal fields to production. A few steel plants, which use soft coal converted into coke, had already had to shut down some of their blast furnaces. There were still prayers to be answered before peace in the whole defense industry prevailed.

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