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)

MOTION-PICTURE JURISDICTIONAL DISPUTES 1567 Mr. Owens. Wouldn't it be presumed, Mr. Casey, that if control were given to the international, or the ones who controlled the various locals or had jurisdiction over them, that they would naturally assign them to the proper group, for instance, like local 80 ? Mr. Casey. Evidently in this thing it was not done. Mr. Owens. Well, that would be the natural assumption, wouldn't it? Mr. Casey. I would have thought so, but it was not done in this case. Mr. Owens. That is all. ISIr. McCann. What was done ? Mr. Casey. A new organization was chartered by the lATSE which was called the set erectors. My personal opinion, gentlemen, is that when they set that up they took practically as much work away from their own grips as they did from the carpenters. Mr. Owens. That was set up after the directive had been handed down ? Mr. Casey. Yes, sir. I had never heard the words "set erection." It was never used in any of our contracts, or anything of that kind, until after that. It was always local 80 or local 44, and they had their work, Mr. McCann. A while ago, Mr. Casey, you commented on the fact that the industry was primarily concerned, that the industry was the one who insisted on going to the Cincinnati meeting, that the industry obligated itself to go along, then you stated you were not consulted when the three-man committee came out on any of its decisions. Were any industrj^ representatives consulted at all with respect to the work that was assigned to the different unions ? Mr. Casey. Not that I know of, except they might have talked with the people at Paramount. I believe that is the only studio they visited. Mr. McCann. Was the 1925 agreement that has so frequently been referred to, ever put into effect? Mr. Casey. I don't think it was from the fact that that was an agreement between the locals. Subsequently, within a very short while after that agreement had been talked about between those locals, the basic agi-eement came into effect, to which the lATSE, through Mr. William Canavan, their president, was a signatory. From 1926 on, everybody worked under the basic agreement. Mr. Owens. At the time of that directive they did not seem to go on the theor}' that the 1925 agreement had been put into effect, they just merely said they were from that time on to work under the 1925 agreement. At least that is the meaning I get out of it. Mr. Casey. You get the same meaning I do. I believe that is what they did say in there. The A. F. of L., gentlemen, gave those three men a job that, my God, no human being in the world could have done in the time they were supposed to do it. It looks from the testimony, and everything else that has been said, that when they got this thing they looked at certain papers. They probably made the decision on those papers. That is the way it looks to me. I might have been hundreds of miles away, but I would not take the job if they gave me a million dollars right on this table today, to go out there and try to straighten out the jurisdiction in those studios, because if I made a decision — and I want to clarify that in a minute — I do not think any one of them would live up to it after a little while.