Storm over NDMB

Many an industrialist cried out last week that the National Defense Mediation Board had dealt industry a foul blow: the "maintenance of membership" clause (TIME, Sept. 1), which the Board had recommended in the Federal Shipbuilding case, was a kick in the groin.

Maintenance of membership, they claimed, was a modified closed shop. It was a blow, therefore, at free enterprise and the individual rights of man. Said the New York Sun's Phelps Adams: "Like every other New Deal agency that has yet been established on the labor front, the Board has given clear evidence of its bias against management, and thus has lost the confidence of large segments of the public."

By implication, fullest fury of the storm burst over William Hammatt Davis, who had succeeded Wisconsin University President Clarence Dykstra as chairman of the Defense Mediation Board. He sponged off in his corner, unperturbed.

Whatever NDMB's future, he could point to a bright past. Of 72 labor disputes certified to it, only 15 were still pending. More significant than the number of settlements made was the fact that the Board had broken critical defense log jams in coal, steel, lumber, shipbuilding, ordnance, machinery, aviation. Even more significant for future U.S. labor relations had been the metamorphosis of the Board's own tri-partite personnel (representatives of management, labor and the public). Weighted with responsibilities, labor's own men had cracked down on many a reckless strike leader, read him the riot act. Management's men had shaken angry, executive fingers at hard-headed fellow employers. Out of one stubborn conference with employers a mediator-industrialist stamped, stormed: "Somebody ought to show those damn fools they're 40 years behind the times."

Pleased over this catalysis was bland, bespectacled William Hammatt Davis, a patent attorney by profession, a mediator by choice, who believes in the basic good will and sanity of men. He also believes that the Board is doing a good job, maintains:

Charges of NDMB's partiality to labor cannot be supported by fact. The Board is unwilling to let either side use the emergency to advance, or destroy, labor gains. It has generally opposed any kind of closed shop and has made that point clear in negotiations, as many a union chief will attest.

In only nine cases, 13% of its formal actions, has it recommended any form of "union security" (by which a company agrees to nurture, sometimes encourage, union membership). In only one instance has it recommended a closed shop: the Bethlehem Shipbuilding case. Its justification: the other 38 shipbuilding firms on the West Coast had already agreed to the closed shop provision of an OPM master contract. In every instance, except one, industrialist members of the panel sitting on the case were in full accord. The exception: Federal Shipbuilding and Drydock Co.

The majority of its panel held then that Federal, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, should concede maintenance of membership so that union leaders would have a stabilized and disciplined organization and thus carry out their difficult part of the contract, a two-year pledge of no strikes.

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