Jurisdictional disputes in the motion-picture Industry : hearings before a special subcommittee of the Committee on Education and Labor, House of Representatives, Eightieth Congress, first-session, pursuant to H. Res. 111 (1948)

340 MOTION-PICTURE JURISDICTIONAL DISPUTES national union, particularly the president of the organization, to protect his men and protect their jobs, because the jobs are their livelihood. Workers have nothing else to sell but their brains and their muscles, their means of production, p,nd so they become animated in their desire to maintain that particular capital which is theirs, which is the right to w^ork. For instance, you take the teamsters. Teamsters drove teams hundreds and hundreds of years. Then came the electric tram and electric bus and displaced many teamsters, and they had a problem of what to do about it. Then came the gasoline bus and displaced the electric tram. Now I say to you in all sincerity, Mr. Chairman, that the man who is displaced from the streetcar probably is -hurt — if he is 40 or 50 he wdll probably be — because the employer of a truck terminal does not need to hire him. He can get younger men. Yet, what are we to do with these men that leave the trams and the electric cars ? It becomes a problem as to what to do with that technological employment. To illustrate again, in the clothing industry some years ago, somebody devised a cutting machine that, instead of cutting one piece of cloth by hand, marked out by chalk, they had a buzz saw they clamped down on 100 pieces of cloth and the buzz saw went around the pieces of cloth and cut 100 pieces. That threw out of employment hundreds of cutters. The employers and the unions got together. They agreed they would put a period of time — some time; 1 think a year — and cut no more than 25 pieces of cloth with that buzz saw. They agreed to draw lots who was to leave the industry. The employers and the union would furnish a little more, several hundreds of dollars, so a man might go out and help himself. That is the situation here. The carpenters say they may lose their bread and butter. The set director and stage hands fear they will lose their employment. So fighting for what is theirs, or what they believe is theirs, and fighting for their very livelihood, these jurisdictional disputes arise. They are not settled by laws. You can't settle them by laws, nor can you settle them by someone's brief, nor the im]>ression left that old men in their dotage don't do just the thing they have the right to do or can do. Suppose the American Federation of Labor were to oust these unions for failure, let's say, to follow the decision rendered by Mr. Doherty and Mr. Knight and Mr. Birthright. Let's say we throw them out — revoke the charter of the one that is wrong. Does that settle it? We hope it would. We wish it would. But it doesn't, Mr. Chairman, as you can see, as you will see by an illustration I will give you. For instance, the machinists and the carpenters came into the dispute with respect to the erection of the runways in breweries. Part of those runways, the sides of them, the chains, are steel. The rollers are wood. The question arises what union is to erect them. The carpenters claimed it and the machinists claimed it. Well, as a result of that dispute, the machinists left the American Federation of Labor. Has that settled the dispute? Why, that has aggravated and led to more disputes because of this. Now, what happens? Now, that the machinists are independent and no longer affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, the other unions claim, "We have a right now to get part of this work