Aftermath Ten Times Worse

Aftermath Ten Times Worse

By, DeWitt Emery

(Editor’s Note: DeWitt Emery

is president of the National

Small Business Men’s Association.)1

The steel strike is over, at least the men are back to work and the mills are running. Actually, however, the strike is still on for many of the manufacturers and fabricators who had to shut down becausey they ran out of n^terial. And the “strike” has not started yet for thousands of small plants, some pretty big ones tbo, which wilf have to shut iown sometime within the next thirty or sixty days because they can’t j£t steel.

Some of these plants will be down Ifor three or four months, maybe longer, and others will never reopen because the owners will not be able to carry the overhead while waiting for steel and thus will be forced into bankruptcy.

Before the strike, defense production was taking about 20% of all of the steel produced. For the next several months defense production will take at least 40% of the total. This, on top of the twenty million tons lost by the strike, means that an awful lot of non-defense manufacturers aren’t going to get any steel at all until sometime next year. The strike itself was bad enough but the * aftermath will be ten times worse. 1 said recently that “the steel strike is a national disgrace.” It is and if it hasn’t hit you yet, directly or indirectly, it will and when it does remember

it was all caused by two men, Phil HWkirray, President of the C.I.O., and H^rry Truman, President of the United States.

In the final settlement Murray accepted terms which the steel mills offered before the strike was a week old Truman, any time after the first day of the strike or even before it started, could have stopped it by invoking the Taft-Hartley Act. Then once the procedures set up by this Act were put into operation, the steel workers would have had an opportunity to vote by secret ballot on whether to'accept the steel mills’ last best offer or go on strike. That ballot