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Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
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Then you'd have a strike. We'd send conciliators in. The Navy would send some more people in. Five or six people would converge on the plant, and it would be adjusted in a few days. But that happened all the time.

Then we began to have longer strikes at Allis-Chalmers, long drawn out ones, with a great deal of argument. Obviously the workers were provided with some kind of brainy advice. They either were represented by counsel, or the man who was the local representative of the workers could put up a very clever argument and keep the negotiations going for days and days with no work going on in the meantime. Yet, when you analyzed it, their grievances seemed to be next to nothing. As in every strike, there were certainly a number of things that ought to be adjusted. There are always a number of things that the employers are doing that they had better not do, such as changing the wage rate on piece work without advance word. That's always provocative, but it's not fatal. If the working people desire to have an understanding, even though they don't know about the change of the piece rate, and if, on the whole, it's not a bad piece rate, it's perfectly endurable. But that caused trouble at Allis-Chalmers on a number of occasions.





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