Help for Hitler

In a message to the A.F. of L. convention, President Roosevelt rapped out: "This is not the time to take chances with the national safety through any stoppage of defense work. . . ." Amen, said President William Green. Amen, squeaked the Communist Daily Worker (its voice is still changing). Said the Daily Worker:

"If Hitler is not defeated, the very existence of our nation and of the entire trade-union movement is imperiled. . . . Anything that interferes with production . . . whether as a result of strikes or of delays by the employers--can only help Hitler and weaken the defense of the United States." (Next day the irreverent New York Daily News commented: "The millennium arrived yesterday.")

Nevertheless, strikes continue. War Department figures for September showed that 81 strikes in plants working on Army contracts caused a loss of 282,350 man-days. At that, it was a drop from August's record: 88 strikes, 421,000 man-days lost.

> Seventy percent of the nation's entire production of light tanks, "jeeps," armored trucks, scout cars was imperiled, according to the War Department, by a dispute at Spicer Manufacturing Corp., makers of truck transmissions. Reason: squabble between A.F. of L. Montagues & C.I.O. Capulets. Because transmissions are the guts of any shaft-driven car, production of combat cars was threatened at the American Car & Foundry plant in Berwick, Pa., at Ford, White Motor Co., Willys-Overland.

> For two weeks the whole U.S. rubber industry faced the possibility of a shutdown as the result of a strike of A.F. of L. workers at the Calco Chemical Division of American Cyanimid Co., Bound Brook, N.J. Reason: the plant produces aniline oil, an accelerator for curing rubber. Management and employes, at the appeal of the National Defense Mediation Board, signed a truce, agreed to keep working while demands for a closed shop and 10-c--an-hour rise were negotiated.

> Important repair work on 17 U.S. and British ships was delayed when 6,000 C.I.O. workers at Robins Drydock and Repair Co., New York, quit work for three days. Reason: acetylene-torch burners would not work beside four non-union burners.

> Manufacture of airplane parts was held up but not stopped by a C.I.O. strike at Air Associates, Inc., in Bendix, N.J., which has $5,000,000 worth of defense-program contracts. It was another flare-up in an old squabble which began last summer. At week's end, after efforts to mediate had failed, the Mediation Board washed its hands of the dispute, left the next move up to the Administration.

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