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APRIL 14, 1947 © “Recently ig Athens 560 persons were outed from bed by security police at ight and whisked to Aegean Islands, sestapo-style. _ (. “Greece is beginning to take on some ispects of a police state.” Phone Strike Labor $ THE six a.m. deadline jumped A across the country Monday morn- ing, operators pulled the plugs from their boards, left company property and cook: their places on the picket lines. The first nationwide telephone strike was under way. Long-distance lines went out immediately; dial systems were expected to deteriorate gradually as breakdowns remained unrepaired. Negotiations had continued up to the last minute in Washington. Secretary of Labor Lewis B. Schwellenbach took charge in the pre-dawn hours. But the zero hour came and went with no agree- ment in sight. Joseph A. Bierne, presi- dent of the National Federation of Tele- phone Workers, pledged. some 342,000 workers to accept local collective bar- gaining or nationwide arbitration of alf issues. The AT&T let the strike begin without comment. But talks went on in Washington while Labor Department conciliators sought solutions throughout the country. The basic dispute between the NFTW and the AT&T centered on the issue of industrywide bargaining. The parent company, insisting that its regional oper- ating subsidiaries were subject to state regulation and local cost factors, argued that wages must also be governed by these factors. An AT&T vice-president, Cleo Frank Craig, was quietly present in Washington last week, but he never en- tered direct negotiations. He reiterated that each regional operating company had real autonomy in dealing with the 39 unions loosely confederated in the NFITW—a claim at which the unions . scoffed. The NFTW did not demand uniform wages but it insisted on centralized bar- gaining to bring wages in different areas into closer relationship. It pointed out that the operating companies’ activities bore the imprint of unified direction— similar local arbitration offers, similar The Men and Women of AT&T orrir eewee J yi i Ne a, a 4 r ‘ee men and women of tele- phone were once the showpiece of US industry: in December, 1939, they got an average of $32.46 weekly compared to a national manufactur- ing average of $25.23. By December, 1946, their wage was up to $42.98, but the manufacturing average had risen to $46.86. Light and power workers were averaging $54.58; rail- way and bus workers, $55.26. Tele- phone workers’ position has deteri- orated even more seriously in terms uf purchasing power. From April, 1945, to January, 1947, their average earn- \ ITT ree T(\ NO \ a= An 2 ings rose 15.2 percent. Over the same period the cost of living was up 20.5 percent; food prices had risen 34.5 percent. Here is what the workers sketched above are being paid, according to the American Union of Telephone Work- ers: installation man, average weekly starting wage $27, average top wage $65; lineman, same average starting wage, average top wage $58; cable layer (construction worker), same as lineman; switchboard operator, aver- age wage $33; switchboard supervisor, average wage $40 to $50.