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let me say this for it. The pressure to take a case was so great from either the CIO or the AF of L that it was almost impossible for them not to. The Department of Labor gladly assented, and perhaps we shouldn't have, perhaps we should have set up more of a proprietary feeling that this was our dispite, to the board's handling these cases. The tangle was terribly unreal usually. It was not a matter of grievances, a group of workmen who had a serious grievance and were therefore going on strike. It was so much more a political and organizing complication that brought it about that you couldn't proceed to settle it in the way that you used to, saying, “Now, see here, these fellows aren't getting enough wages. They work longer hours here than they do in some other plant”--the usual, old time grievances. You could bring both parties together and see what were the reasonable aspects of the grievance. Then you could hit a kind of compromise between what the employers have been paying or doing in the past, and what the workers think they want. You could get something that would be agreeable to both sides. That was the typical pattern for the settlement of a strike.

But when you got this new group coming in, this new group that called itself militant, and was militant, particularly against what they called the fuddyduddyness of the old AF of L - that is, the ability to compromise, the willingness to compromise on less than a perfect situation - then you got a framework of political tension and antagonism that was very difficult to handle. One couldn't but say that