Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 912

a forum, a board, a court, to which they could go and make protest, was perhaps the healthiest thing that there could be. So the Department of Labor did not protest the board's taking over cases.

The CIO people particularly, and later the AF of L people, wanted before everything to have the cases come before what they called a big board. In other words, it was a public occasion, which they utilized for all that the publicity was worth as an organizing technique. The newspaper reporters wrote it up, took statements from the labor people, and all that, until it became a newsworthy situation. If it would have been made less newsworthy, many cases could have been settled. But so long as they were newsworthy there was publicity in it, and there was publicity in it for the organizing group. So you got into a continual jam.

This question of union security, or closed shop, would not have arisen if there had been but one set of unions in the field. Of that I am sure. There would have been a compromise about it. But there was constant hazard this way. The organizer couldn't go away and leave the union he'd just organized because the other crowd - be it the AF of L or the CIO - would creep up and organize against him, make another organization. This was very harassing to the employers. They detested it. But they didn't detest it as much as they would detest having to enforce any kind of a pattern upon their unwilling workers.





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help