Toledo union journal. [volume] (Toledo, Ohio) 1942-current, 1949-07-29
Fierce TrogIody+e Animals
From UAW-CIO Ammunition)

DOWN to workers security: BY the end
~ of the Second World War, organized
labor had added half again as many mem
bers as it had before the war Including
Ford and Little Steele The strengthened
organization was to enable workers to pre-
vent a Joker from being played on them.
While wages were held down by the Little
Steel Formula, the tax laws had given the
corporations device by which war profits
could be taken after the war and huge war
chests could be filled for them in the Feds
eral Treasury. These windfalls were used
TO finance another attempt to repeat the
union-smashing drives after the first world
war The Federal Treasury financed GM
during the GIN shutdown. But the solidar-
ity of the GIN workers wrecked the en-
ployers' attempt to destroy labor directly
as finally as the failure of the Great Steel
Strike had broken the organizing attempts
of the AFL after the first war.
Then the vast war profits of the corpor-
alton were invested in propaganda mills
instead of steel plants. The propaganda
submerged the OPA and created an arti-
ficial fog in which the Taft-Hartley law
was enacted
Through the repeal of the OPA, bill
lions of dollars of workers savings, accu-
mulated during the war, were transferred
from the drawers where workers kept
their war bonds into corporation bank ac-
counts
But the flank attack on unions failed.
However, with the battle to preserve un-
onslaughts won, new troubles appear for
workers.
Unemployment rises menacingly. Be-
cause wages do not enable workers to buy
what their labor can produce, advertise
ments and signs and news items pointing
to deepening depression dot the neWspa-
pers like rashes that precede plague.
"These international combinations OF
industrial capital" William Allen White
said, "are fierce trogodyte animals with
tremendous social power and no social
brain"
Now supplying brain for the econ
omy, organized workers, the men and
women in unions do have an answer to
problem the corporations have never been
able to solve--how to keep men working
and idle factories employed. The answer
Is the Workers Security Program, engi-
neered to prevent a depression by keep
ing purchasing power up.
In the country, too, there are other
signs that the senseless periodic tragedies
workers have suffered for more than a
hundred years of an industrial economy
are coming to an end. The under standing
of economic problems by workers in l949
is higher than ever before in history. Par
ticipation in democratic unions has trained
fiften million Americans in the processes
Of democracy.
Surely now they are moving out to ap-
ply their skill to the problems of political
democracy. AT last millions of Americans,
whether they have heard the lines or not,
are beginning to feel the great truth in
Walt Whitmans words
II never before SO realized the majesty
and reality of the American people en-
masse. 1t fell upon me like great awe"
Mote: Not all the quotations or all the
facts summarized here are out of Foster
Rhea Dulles superb book, Labor in Amer
lea, but most of the quotations do come
from him, and the entire magnificent
story, crisply and intelligently told, is
there An undogmatic book that tells the
story of labor very WELL better, in fact, for
anyone except scholar, than it has been
told anywhere else.)