The Waterbury Democrat., 1942-11-19


 Curran listed did run into trouble after they left U. s. ports. One was torpedoed and one has been given up for lost. Several ran into storms. One had mechanical break down. One went aground. Two did have to come back to port and be reloaded.
 But when it comes to pinning down all these disasters to the one cause of bad loading, not even the insurance companies can definitely fix the the blame.
 Giving Curran the benefit of a doubt and admitting all his charges are true, you should take into con- sideration that these are eight cases out of perhaps thousands.
 So you begin to look elsewhere for reasons and you run into some interesting factors, the most amaz- ing of which is merely another chapter in the warfare between the A. F. of L. and the c. I. O. It spells out about like this:
 c. I. o. vS. A. F. OF L.
 Curran's union is union of sea- men-the men who actually sail the ships and to whom all credit is due for having done an heroic job Curran's union is affiliated with the c. I. O. The men who load the ships which Currans sailors operate, however, belong to the International ! Iongshoremen'S Union headed by Joseph P. Ryan. This union is af- filiated with A. F. of L., and just about now you begin to catch on.
 This is the way the situation lines up at all Atlantic coast and Gulf ports where ships are loaded by A. F. of L. 1ongshoremen and sailed by c. I. O. sailors. On the Pacific coast, the situation is just reversed. At western ports, c. I. O. longshoremen in Harry Bridges International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union, load the ships, while A. F. of L. sailors in the Seafarers' International Union of North America man the ships.
 It is to break up the A. of F. of L. domination of the eastern ports waterfront that the c. I. O. Ma tional Maritime Union might be genuinely interested in spreading dirt about the way ships are loaded. From a strictly impartial point of view, there probably isn't anything which the Joe Curran Maritime Union men could say about the Joe Ryan Longshore- | AccAoio o fin,, 1YYISinh rr-n111IY1tf be true. The Ryan union has been called racket by experts and in many languages. The record is long, but in all this talk there is a good bit of the pot calling the kettle black and you can cast the characters either way you want to-. TECHNICALITIES INVOLVED
 There are a lot of technicalities involved, including the dispute as to whether the c. I. o. hiring hall system is better than the A. F. of L. labor gang "shape-up" hiring system, the claim of Curran that the east coast should have gov- ernment labor management Mari time Industrial Board to increase efficiency, the claim of the east coast that it's longshoremen load more cargo per man hour by work ing larger sling loads, and the counter claim that the east coast now operates on only a basic one shift, eight-hour day, making the time of ship turnaround in east coast ports much longer than on the west coast.
 When the War Shipping Admin istration first took over the su- preme command of ship loading there was some belief that the government should step into this situation. Now official policy seems to be to let the situation alone till after the war.
 1 In other words, why stir up a labor war on the waterfront right now, of all times, when there's real war on?