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)

1980 MOTION-PICTURE JURISDICTIONAL DISPUTES Now, the same thing could happen at Warner's, but when a mass picket line is out there, the people don't go through it. Now, there are other gates at Warner's, and testimony in plenty of court cases will show that people went in and out of Warner Bros., at a lot of gates, but the one gate where the mass picket line was, was the advertisement. When Warner's attacked that line with the fire hose and tear gas, many of the lATSE and other union people, people who weren't union people, people who were directors and actors, that saw that thing, refused to go back to Warner Bros, until that picket line was eliminated. Mr. Kearns. You brought up that point there that your union decided after 13 months, after a man had been on strike 13 months and had established himself a good union member, that you felt that if he needed the work, it was all right for him to go through. What is the status of a fellow today, who might have been called on strike, and who probably has had a lot of financial difficulty in the family — maybe his wife has been sick, or his children, and maybe he needs to go back into the plant to work the next day after the strike is called — what is his status, while maybe there is some other fellow who stayed out 13 months to prove to you that he is a good union member? What are you going to do in cases like that, where "you cannot take care of a fellow ? Mr. SoRRELL. Mr. Kearns, I will tell you. There is no use in my kidding you. The people automatically, at the settlement, when this thing is settled, will have to come to the union and make arrangements before they can go back to work, because it is not right to have one man find himself a job outside and work for less money and pay $5 a day into the union for a couple of years and another man go into the studio and go to work and earn bigger money and not pay anything. I think you can understand that. It isn't right for one man to practically starve — and there has been, you know, desperate misery — and because of his principles, stick by his principles, and be punished by letting the other fellow go through the line and not get punished. Mr. Kearns. Yes. Mr. Sorrell. So there will have to be a settlement of these things when the thing is over, and these men who have gone through, some of them won't work in the industry any more. Some of them, there will be provisions for them. Now, I want to make an illustration of what happened in 1937. I think you should know this. In 1937, I told you there were about 12 men who went back to work. At that time we could throw them out of the union, and they couldn't go to work. It was not in the constitution then as it is now. The constitution has been changed to give the general executive board of the painters the final vote to take men off their jobs. So the strike was settled, and all of the nonunion men were taken out. Now, there was a question of the men in our own union. They hadn't been to tiial yet. A democratic union has certain methods of doing things. Charges had been preferred against them, but we couldn't take them off the job because we hadn't tried that yet. Naturally, the producers would like to save these men. Pat Casey asked me what I thought, whether we would fine them or whether I thought we would expel them.