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fancy things, including travel time, or portal to portal pay.

Portal to portal pay was invented by the War Labor Board. John Lewis was always proposing it. You couldn't work it out on a satisfactory arrangement that was just and fair. They had kind of a loose arrangement about it, without many words being said, in the coal industry. It just had to be that way. The way that the War Labor Board finally determined it was utterly unenforceable and inapplicable to the industry itself. It has ceased to be, and ceased to be almost immediately. They don't even try to do it. Lewis doesn't demand it of the operators because he knows that it can't be done. He reconciled his men to that. What happens is that you have to pay the man who has a three mile walk to the face of the coal where he's working the same as the man who doesn't have to walk that and produces more coal therefore. When you have to pay that man out of the production and earning of the mine, instead of out of a special charity fund, you get into a perfect dither. There's no way to make it fair.

It was the coal industry that almost killed the War Labor Board. They labored and anguished over it. More vituperation and bad name-calling came about over that than over any other one thing. That was what primarily alienated John Lewis from the War Labor Board forever. The War Labor Board insisted that they would handle the coal case, and Lewis didn't want them to handle any of the coal cases.