The Charlotte News

Monday, May 19, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

This week begins the last full week in which Cash would be associate editor of The News. As Mary described it in her Red Clay Reader article of 1967, accessible above, it was a whirlwind few days, a trip to Shelby on Sunday, the 25th, to say goodbye to Cash's parents and sister, a trip to Chapel Hill to say goodbye to Mary's mother and so that Cash, at the invitation of the journalism school, could address some visiting high school journalism students, which happened to include in the audience just graduated New York native Joseph Morrison, Cash's first biographer in 1967.

Just what day his work at The News officially ended is unclear. A May 30 piece appearing in The News, which we shall provide next week, indicated their departure in the wee hours of that day. But whether Cash contributed through Thursday's paper, or even left a stock of pieces to follow through the end of the week to finish out the month, is subject to conjecture. We haven't read ahead on these dates and so will take our guess as we reach the latter days next week, whether there was any clear demarcation line in style and content of the editorial column.

Having otherwise performed our sufficient work on this day's offerings five years ago and rid the landscape of all the mosquitoes in the meantime, we hereby strike and take the rest of the day off, whether at stake national defense or no national defense.

Jones' Impatience Is Shared By Increasing Numbers

The impatience with the new wave of strikes expressed by Jesse Jones will probably bring down upon him the denunciation of John L. Lewis. But it is an impatience which is shared by a growing number of people, and one which Labor will be ill-advised to ignore.

Obviously, there is little real excuse for any of the strikes. A point in issue in the West Coast shipyards is whether some men shall be paid $1.12 an hour and time and a half for overtime (under a contract which they recently signed of their own free will) or $1.25 cents an hour and double pay for overtime. And the issue which now threatens again to tie up the coal mines is whether or not the Southern mines shall retain a differential of 40 cents a day which they have enjoyed since 1938.

With the general merits and demerits of these disputes we are not concerned. But it is manifest that the wage dispute in the shipyards can safely be left to the Defense Mediation Board, and that now is no time to take up the differential question, which is a highly involved one.

Nobody of fair mind demands that labor take the rap for national defense while their employers pile up expanding profits. Coercive laws have as yet won no wide-spread support. But most matters of just dispute can be adjusted without stoppage of work, and that stoppage seems unjustified, unless of course, you are deliberately out to wreck the national policy, like the Communists on the West Coast, or to take advantage of the national crisis to try to grab more power for yourself, as John Lewis apparently is.