How Peace Came to Toledo

I

Do you remember the shrieking newspaper headlines a few years ago under Toledo date lines? Strikes, lockouts, rioting, and mobilization of National Guardsmen appeared to be the only news about Toledo that was printed. It almost seemed as if the city at the western end of Lake Erie were on the verge of a revolution.

Well, to judge by what has happened in Toledo in the last two and a half years, there has been something like a revolution — but a peaceful one. Labor and management are no longer at each other’s throats. Instead of giving an exhibition of the terrible costs of intolerance and misunderstanding, they are showing us what can be done by patient and tactful consideration of each other’s problems.

Perhaps Toledo’s industrial outbreaks were necessary; I don’t know. Yet I hate to think that any dispute between employers and employees cannot be settled by people putting their feet under the mahogany — or on top of it — and talking their problems out in man-to-man fashion.

I don’t mean that Toledo’s troubles were inevitable; but they must be considered in the light of some of the things that had been happening in that community before the spark was finally set off and the whole thing crashed out in the newspapers.

When a mob makes a frontal attack upon a plant, as happened in one bloody Toledo strike, there’s a reason for it. Men don’t turn into wild beasts overnight without some provocation.

What happened on that fateful night in 1934 at the Auto-Lite Company’s plant cannot be condoned, but it can be explained. How? Very simply. By the attitude of some of the workers towards some of the men who ran the city’s industries, banks, and its government.

Figure it out for yourself: a city of 300,000 men and women, people with money in the bank; many working in auto-parts plants feeding the Detroit assembly lines, others tending the glassmaking machines or working in metalproducts factories. Along came the depression, and with it part-time work — then total unemployment. One June day in 1931, Toledo awoke to find one of the big banks closed. This institution had many workingmen’s deposits. There followed a mad run on the other banks; soon three of them were shut tight as a drum.

Toledo was stunned. Retail business dwindled. Foreclosures rocked the community. Some factories closed. Selfrespecting workmen had to go on relief. They took their dole in sacks of food. It was something for their bellies, but not much nourishment for their selfesteem.

Later the Willys-Overland automobile plant went into the hands of a receiver. Thousands more were made idle. The city was also in serious financial trouble. For five years it had been operating at a deficit. The people were dissatisfied with the conduct of their own affairs; there were much waste and mismanagement.

Add all these ingredients, stir up with some radical leadership, and you get what Toledo got — what, indeed, any community would get: riots, misery, sullen despair.

By the time the Roosevelt Administration came along in 1933, Toledo was living on the edge of a volcano. Anything could happen. It did, too. But I am ahead of my story.

II

Toledo employers, for the most part, had opposed trade-unions for years, and their attitude toward them did not change very rapidly when the National Industrial Recovery Act was adopted. Unions continued to be fought all along the line. There were some small strikes during 1933 and early 1934, but the nationshocking thriller was the Auto-Lite strike called on April 12, 1934. This strike, with its extreme violence, its clashes between mobs and National Guardsmen, lasted forty-seven working days and resulted in two deaths, scores of injuries, and a black eye for Toledo. It was finally settled through Federal intermediaries, but it left scars in the community.

In the next year there was a wild scramble of workmen to join unions. The employers resisted. The fighting temperature went up on both sides.

Then, in April 1935, came the second major strike in the automobile industry (the Auto-Lite was the first), about a year after President Roosevelt had created the Automobile Labor Board for the purpose of averting a threatened automobile strike. This strike, in the Toledo Chevrolet transmission plant, was a ‘bottleneck’ affair, for the plant made transmissions for many General Motors assembly plants. The strike lasted three weeks, affected 3000 workers directly, and some 30,000 indirectly because it became necessary to close twenty-one plants. More bad blood between men and management, and more pay lost.

The Chrevrolet strike was the first major dispute in Toledo which drew me to that city. When I arrived I found the plant closed. Pickets would n’t even allow a telephone operator to enter. Bookkeepers could n’t get in to make up the pay rolls. I got the union to ease up on its restrictions. Although the leaders were suspicious about what might happen, they finally took my word for it that no production workers would sneak in as bookkeepers.

Then I conferred with the union leader and learned about the workers’ principal grievance. Once this aspect of the situation was clarified, I found that another question was raised: Who was to bargain for the workers?

Some red tape had to be cut, but we hurdled that obstacle quickly by holding an election. The United Automobile Workers won, and W. S. Knudsen, then vice president of General Motors, and his associates sat down around the table with the labor group, and pretty soon the dispute was ironed out.

About a month later, with unionization spreading rapidly, Toledo figured in the headlines again with a strike of power-house employees. This situation was extremely critical, for it led to a threat of a general strike. In fact, our conference committee worked with the threat of a ‘secret deadline’ for the general strike hanging over our heads. While we were talking, the street lights in one large area of the city were out and live wires dangled dangerously close to pedestrians and motorists. This strike, like the others, yielded to the ‘give-andtake’ of a series of conferences which I arranged and during which the principals on both sides talked the situation out in man-to-man fashion.

This piecemeal method of settlement was a slow, man-killing job. Surely, I thought, there must be some more systematic and inclusive way of handling these disputes. You need a fireman when the house is burning, but a good sprinkler system might put out the fire before the firemen arrive.

At this time I was busy flying about the country trying to mediate industrial disputes of all kinds.

For some time I had been thinking of a plan whereby these disputes might be settled before costly strikes took their toll of crippled pay rolls and curtailed production. It seemed to me that Toledo would be a good place to try out the plan. My idea was to create an Industrial Peace Board composed of an equal number of representatives from organized labor and organized industry and an impartial chairman jointly chosen. Later the board was to be enlarged to include public representatives. The board members were not to represent their special groups; each was to see the problem whole.

The first thing I did was to take it up with the newspaper editors. As I explained it to them, the board was to be distinctly one of mediation and conciliation and would not arbitrate cases.

The procedure would be for labor and management to negotiate as in the past, but when negotiations broke down and the conferees faced a strike or lockout they would take their case to the chairman of the board. The chairman would then ask one or more from each group to form a panel and to confer with the labor and management spokesmen separately at first and later jointly. Pending the results of the conferences, there would be no strikes or lockouts.

I suggested that if a small panel were unsuccessful the chairman might call the full board to sit on the case. (As a matter of fact, it has never been necessary to call in the entire board.) If it appeared then that a settlement was blocked by the local spokesmen for either side, an appeal would be made to the leaders of labor or of the industry who might be located elsewhere.

It has been my experience that when men and management have been negotiating a long time they are apt to become impatient and irritable — there is a loss of balance. Many disputes go on the rocks when the participants become conference-drunk. In that state they are apt to bark at each other, commit mayhem, or do almost anything. By bringing fresh minds into the picture at this stage of the game a quick agreement can frequently be reached.

Most strikes, I told the editors, are community problems and can be settled in the community. I offered the coöperation of the Labor Department in getting the plan started and suggested that the slight expense of the board should be borne by the city.

That was my plan in essence, although some modifications were made later.

The newspaper men were in thorough accord with the peace plan, and they plunged right in to help put it over. Without them it could never have gained the wide acceptance it did. These men — Carlton K. Matson of the News-Bee, Grove Patterson of the Blade, and Richard Patterson of the Times — did yeoman service in explaining the plan to the business and professional groups. They talked it from sunup to sundown to all who would listen, and their editorials punched the idea home.

Before the plan was approved by labor and management, there was a lot of uncertainty. Both sides were suspicious. The labor crowd wondered if something was going to be ‘put over’ on them. They suspected the plan might be a wedge for the open shop or for compulsory arbitration. The employers wondered if it would not lead to the closed shop.

‘Why submit our troubles to a committee?’ they asked.

‘Maybe our competitors may learn about our business.’

We had to urge on them that the labor-management disputes were mainly local problems which involved the whole city for good or evil.

Back and forth we went to labor and to management trying to sell the plan. The labor leaders wondered if the plan would put them in bad before the public. They thought that perhaps the employers would make so many demands which could not be agreed to that they would then tell the world the ‘turmoil’ was caused by labor’s ‘ unreasonable attitude.’

Labor also feared that the plan would postpone strikes indefinitely until the advantage shifted to the employers. I saw no reason why either side or both sides could not have recourse to the plan instantaneously and settle the dispute in one way or another in a few days. As a matter of fact, I believed that the board’s work would prevent strikes before the disputes got to the boiling point. I wanted to avoid the ‘bombs and bullets’ outcome of such controversies, because they are too costly and they leave bitter memories behind them.

It was made clear to those who were ‘from Missouri’ that the board would never have the authority to order anyone to do anything, that the essence of the idea was voluntary coöperation between men and management, that the board members would represent the community at large and not one group or faction.

The board, I explained, would never arbitrate or make ‘final’ and ‘binding’ commitments. If the parties in dispute wanted an arbitrator, they would have to go elsewhere, for I felt that once we entered the field of arbitration an aggrieved party might turn against the mediation plan if he felt, he was denied a square deal under arbitration.

We tried to hammer home the idea that the board would not sit in judgment on anybody, that it was not to be a highhat proposition, and that it would not interfere with or assist in union organization campaigns or take a position on ‘open’ or ‘closed’ shop.

Finally, at two meetings with the business and labor spokesmen, they agreed to what Mr. Matson called Toledo’s ‘greatest opportunity.’

The Toledo Chamber of Commerce named these members to represent the employers: —

John D. Biggers,¹ President, Libbey-OwensFord Glass Co.

Harry C. Tillotson, President, Tillotson Manufacturing Co.

Earle C. Smith, President-Treasurer, Toledo Porcelain Enamel Products Co.

Frank H. Adams, Vice President and General Manager, Surface Combustion Corp.

Royce G. Martin, President, Electric AutoLite Co.

The Central Labor Union named their spokesmen as follows: —

Otto Brach, Secretary, Central Labor Union

Fred Watson, C.L.U. Vice President and Business Agent, Carpenters’ Local

Lawrence Aubry, Chairman, C.L.U. Committee of 23 and Business Agent for the Motion Picture Operators’ Local

Oliver Myers, Secretary, Committee of 23 and Business Agent for the Electrical Workers Local

Walter Guntrup, Editor of the Union Leader

III

I don’t mind confessing that my knees wabbled a bit when the plan was finally accepted. You see, I had pledged my name to it and had enlisted people in the venture. If this thing fails, I said to myself — well, as a matter of fact I did not get much further, because I was confident the plan would work, not perfectly perhaps, but with measurable success.

As I had been drafted to assist General Hugh Johnson, WPA Administrator in New York City, I relinquished the direction of the plan to Ralph A. Lind, Cleveland’s Regional Director of the National Labor Relations Board, a man with an unusual record for handling labor disputes. Once Ralph was committed, he had to help me make the idea work, because his reputation was tied up with it too.

As general chairman and director of the board, his first case was a cafeteria strike which had been going on for several weeks. He settled it in fortyeight hours.

Then cleaning and dyeing plant employees threatened a city-wide strike affecting 1500 employees and 24 companies. And land, with the moral support of the board behind him, stepped in and emerged with an agreement. Shortly afterward, he ended a strike threat by 400 employees of a textile firm.

The plan took hold quickly, and a few weeks after it was inaugurated eight impartial citizens at large were named to sit with the labor and management representatives. These were: —

Judge Charles F. Chittenden, Probate Court

Rabbi Leon E. Feuer

Judge Robert G. Gosline, Common Pleas Court

John W. Hackett, Attorney

Milo J. Warner, Attorney

Clarence A. Benedict, County Relief Director

Rev. Mgr. Francis J. Macelwane, Dean of Toledo Teachers College

Louis L. Eppstein, President, LaSalle & Kosh Co. (Department Store); President Retail Merchants Board

The appointments caused a flurry in the labor ranks because the union leaders felt that they would be ‘outvoted’; similar fears were entertained by management, some industrialists believing there was a labor bias to some impartial representatives. This was pretty good testimony of the impartiality of the selections.

But the plan did not call for any voting, and no votes have ever been taken. The board does not act that, way. There are no defendants, no judgments, no compulsions.

The first meeting of the entire board, including the eight impartial members, was held early in September 1935. It was then decided to establish the board as a permanent body, and the following month Leander S. Harding, a conciliator of the United States Department of Labor, became executive secretary. The board’s trial period continued for another seven months; and when Mr. Harding left, in March 1936, the City Council, by an ordinance, made the board a part of the municipal government and provided $5625 for its expenses to the end of the year. This included the salary of the director and a secretary-stenographer.

In wandering about the country mediating industrial disputes, I had observed that some newspaper men covering labor were excellent material for conciliators. In Toledo I found that Edmund Ruffin, labor reporter on the News-Bee, had a fine grasp of the labor situation, and I recommended him to succeed Mr. Harding. He was accepted as director, and he has been doing a good job ever since.

Toledo got a second good break in 1935 when it adopted the city-manager small-council form of government, which went into office in 1936. The spiritual rebirth which led to this change also helped assure the board’s success.

The city-manager government set the stage for amicable labor relations. It provided adequate police protection without curbing labor’s right to peaceful picketing.

The board did not find its path strewn with roses. It was hardly a month old when I left for Bermuda on my first vacation in years. Shortly afterward 300 gas workers in Toledo struck. Skeleton crews were about to be removed and gas shut off when Miss Ella Helbig, my secretary, promised the union I would return on the next boat if the crews were retained. The union agreed and I sailed at once, flying to Toledo as soon as I landed. In three days the strike settlement terms had been arranged, but had it not been for the board’s assistance, the tireless activity of its secretary, the cooperation of the newspapers, and the good will of the Toledo Associates, the strike might well have dragged on much longer.

Then, too, the Toledo Associates — formed in 1935 by a group of business men to interpret Toledo and headed by Joseph K. Close, an extremely capable executive — proved of very real benefit in getting the plan a sympathetic hearing.

The Toledo experiment in industrial relations attracted attention from the beginning, and scores of other cities have asked for information on how it works. Hardly a week passes that committees from other cities do not drop off at Toledo to spend a day or two looking into the plan.

IV

As the board got into its stride, it was found that the director became the keystone of the industrial peace structure. On his shoulders fell the task of keeping in touch with labor-management negotiations so that he might make informal suggestions, if necessary, to speed up settlement, avoid deadlocks, or break them when they occurred. It was his job to keep the board members informed and to call them in when a crisis occurred.

The essence of the whole idea embodied in the Toledo plan is its informality. Labor and management know that neither the director nor the board members have any axes to grind, so if either side calls for help it is not regarded as an admission of weakness.

The type of men on the board has had a great deal to do with its success. They respond to requests for help like firemen. They know how costly industrial disputes are and how quickly they flare up into real conflagrations if they are not squelched promptly. One board member whose sister was rushed to the hospital for an emergency operation kept in touch with a labor dispute from the hospital and went back into conference on a pending dispute as soon as he left her bedside.

There is absolutely no formal method of procedure. When the director hears of a labor-industry negotiation going on he keeps in touch with the parties. He may offer his services if things do not seem to be going well, or he may be asked to step in by either side. There are no set rules.

The director may confer separately with labor and management or see them jointly, depending on the circumstances. When he has the whole case before him he decides on the best approach towards a settlement. If the case does not yield to this treatment he may call in a board panel comprising one representative from labor, one from management, and one from the people. Usually the director is in touch with the board members, talking the matter over informally and getting their reaction to the dispute.

Sometimes the director has a panel member, say an employer, call up the management side of the dispute and ease the way for a settlement; a labor member may do the same for his side. The director’s job is to be a first-aid nurse to ailing industrial relations, a diplomat to ease negotiations into proper channels, a Dutch uncle to ward off misunderstandings by some common-sense advice, and a doctor to heal the breach when one occurs.

Most of the cases are settled by the director. Magical? Not at all. There are two reasons for this. First, the disputants know the board is ready, behind the scenes, to take up the dispute if the parties to the controversy fail. That means something, you may be sure, for the board members are among Toledo’s most respected citizens. Usually the parties prefer to settle by direct negotiation if possible.

Second, they know that public opinion is behind the plan, and neither side is anxious to fly in the face of this opinion by turning down a mediation offer. The newspapers have reflected the community’s opinion, but have done it without any arbitrary editorial ‘cracking-down.’

It has been tremendously important, possibly vital, to the success of the Toledo plan that the newspapers have strictly refrained from trying to ‘use’ the plan in any partisan way, or to manipulate it for any purposes of special pleading.

You cannot have a successful industrial peace board of this type without absolute impartiality on the part of the press. If the employers can use the press to pillory labor, the plan is out. If labor can use the press to castigate management undeservedly, the plan will fail. The plan will be killed the day the press forgets that its rôle is that of public servant, even-handed in its judgments, yet fearless withal.

And the board members, too, cannot fail to see that the larger interest must prevail. They do, and that is another reason for the board’s success, so far.

This incident may illustrate how the board members regard their responsibility. After one of the panel meetings the employee member turned to the employer member and remarked: —

‘Say, which side are you on? You seemed to be arguing for the men all the time.’

‘ Which side are you on?’ the employer member asked. ‘You seemed to be arguing for the employer all the time.’

One of the most skeptical of the labor members at the beginning was a chap who was very class-conscious when the plan was first explained. He had made a good many speeches for years criticizing the employers, and he made no bones about his distrust of them.

When dispute after dispute had been settled to his and the employers’ satisfaction without costly strikes or lockouts, he remarked one day: ’Darn it, this plan had n’t ought to work, but it does.’

Labor looks at the plan like this. It says: ‘The boss can’t ignore the community.’

Management says the same thing, substituting ‘labor’ for ‘the boss.’

The two labor leaders who were out in front during the general strike movement in Toledo are on the Peace Board. You could write a book on that. These men were supposed to be ‘wild-eyed Bolsheviks’ in 1934 and 1935, but they are the same men to-day that they were then. What’s the difference, you ask. To-day they know that some machinery exists to adjust disputes with reasonable speed and under fair-minded auspices. The result is that they discourage costly strikes.

The board is a buffer which takes up the shock of class conflict. For example, employees of a parking garage voted to strike for higher wages and reduced hours after an unsuccessful conference with the employer. When the board director stepped in, he learned the employer was willing to concede wage rates somewhat above those of his competitors but not too much out of line with them. The parties were all tangled up, however, on what prevailing wages actually were. On this they were unable to agree.

The director obtained the necessary data from three competing garages, and as a result a settlement was negotiated and the strike order rescinded.

Another time the director heard that a strike vote was being taken in an autoparts plant employing 400 men. The union’s business agent said that two men had been fired because they had joined the union. The employer denied this and offered to take one man back. ‘ But the second man — never! ’ The second chap was a good welder with eight years to his credit in the plant, but the plant manager said he had indulged in a lot of cursing and had thrown rough castings into a box instead of handling them more carefully.

The director’s investigation disclosed that the second man was an excellent workman but that sometimes his welding machine ‘balked.’ It was an old model, and when the work did not come out as precisely as the mechanic expected he cursed the machine roundly and chucked the casting down.

At first the manager offered to suspend the mechanic for sixty days, but when the director said that sounded too much like a jail sentence he relented. The employee apologized for his swearing, returned to work the next day, and the strike vote was canceled. I guess the employer did something about that balky machine.

The board finds that the differences which divide men are economic. Personalities, however, muddy up the waters and sometimes make strikes inevitable. If the board can take the personalities out of the area of dispute it can generally get a settlement. In some cases the director has obtained the reinstatement of employees who appeared to have been dismissed unjustly, and in other cases he has found that dismissals were justified. Every case is different and necessarily stands on its own bottom.

One of Toledo’s most influential ministers says that the board ‘creates the mood for settling disputes.’

‘The board has n’t won every skirmish, but it has won the battle,’ is the way he puts it. ‘People have faith in the board’s integrity. They don’t know exactly what has happened, but they know it’s good.’

As a certain Democrat says, ‘Let’s look at the record.’

In the first thirty months of its existence the Toledo Peace Board handled 138 disputes involving 23,372 persons. Of these, 87 disputes involving 14,247 persons were settled without strikes or lockouts; 31 strikes involving 4942 persons were settled. The board participated in but did not settle 17 disputes involving 1719 persons. Nearly all of these disputes were settled by the parties directly concerned. The board held two elections affecting 2364 employees. One lockout involving 100 employees was settled.

V

Where does the National Labor Relations Board come in on the Toledo picture, you may ask. The NLRB is designed for an entirely different purpose — to see to it that employees in interstate commerce are free to bargain collectively through their own agents. The board has no mediatory powers, although its investigations frequently result in settlements. Its procedure is through complaints, citations of employers, formal hearings before a trial examiner, and decisions enforceable in the courts.

The Toledo Peace Board is a voluntary agency, handling local disputes which may or may not affect interstate commerce directly or indirectly; BUT the whole procedure is on a voluntary plane, without intervention of any law or the use of any force but moral suasion, backed up by a community interest and, as I said earlier, under the alert eyes of the newspapers.

The cost of the board’s operations to the end of 1937 was approximately $12,000. What did this trifling sum save? There is no way of estimating the cost of strikes that were averted, the loss in orders, wages, expense of police, guards, deputy sheriffs, and all the rest. And certainly there is no way of estimating the cost to Toledo of having its labor troubles smeared over the nation’s newspapers.

On the other hand, many plant extensions have been made and new plants have been attracted to Toledo since the peace plan became effective. I have before me as I write a list of 27 plant expansions that have been put through since the Toledo plan went into effect, running up into millions of dollars, and a list of 19 new industries which have made Toledo their home since the labor Peace Board began to function. The trend was the other way before industrial peace came up over the labor-management war horizon.

When Toledo celebrated its Centennial last year, it was proud of its Peace Board’s record. The Centennial supper, when 2500 Toledoans assembled in the new $1,000,000 armory, was a concrete testimonial to industrial peace. Industrialists and union leaders sat side by side. Mr. Biggers was toastmaster, and General Johnson and I made addresses. It was a happy moment for all of us.

The Toledo plan is not perfect, because it deals with that most uncertain quantity — human nature. But human nature, I claim, is essentially reasonable, if reason is given half a chance. It gets that chance with the Toledo Peace Board.

To-day the whole world is in turmoil. Things have happened to the peoples of other nations that are shocking to every American. But it is well to remember that all their troubles started from within their own borders. Keeping that in mind, we must needs put our house in order — within. The relationships between management and labor are of tremendous importance in this endeavor.

This is what Toledo did by creating unselfish teamwork. There labor and industry are pulling together and not apart; they have supplanted snarls with smiles. The Toledo plan, with its theme of patience, tolerance, and understanding, can be woven into the national pattern of our industrial life.