Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes. We are opposed to the principle of arbitration.

Senator BAILEY. You are a little wary of this thing of Federal control, are you not?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes. We have discussed it in the past 6 months all up and down the coast.

Senator BAILEY. I do not blame you at all for being wary of it. I am wary of it myself.

Senator BERRY. With all of which I agree, Senator. Of course, you have had long experience, but you have had some violent situations between the day Andrew Furuseth established the principle and its present-day application, have you not? There have been sad experiences, have there not?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. That is right.

Senator BERRY. I am wondering if those sad experiences you had in that transition period were not more costly and more violent to the interests of your membership than perhaps the settlement by arbitration and the continued arbitration and coordination of the two interests. I ask you that question because I have had some experience in this respect. I am opposed to compulsory arbitration, and I join Senator Bailey in my opposition to continued interference by the Government in the settlement of matters between men engaged in business. These men in your organization are in the shipping business, and I believe that the shipowners and the sailors can best adjust their problems, because, as you well said, they know more about them than an outsider.

Bringing it up to your relationship with the shipowners, and not with the Government, as between peaceful adjustments and war, do you not think that an agreed process of arbitration as between the shipowners and your union would be better than war?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. The time might come. That might happen at any time. If the shipowners and the sailors agreed to arbitration, then they would choose the arbitrators.

Senator BERRY. That is genuine collective bargaining, is it not, between the parties involved?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. That is right.

Senator BERRY. You can reach the point of arbitration of it, can you not?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes. There may be things with respect to which we can agree to refer them to an arbitrator, but we object to any Federal laws being established to tell us what to do, because we feel that we know more about it, regardless of how fair a board might be. No doubt it would be fair enough, but they do not know the conditions, and cannot hand down an intelligent decision.

Senator BAILEY. You are unwilling to have the Congress select your arbitrators.

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes.

Senator BAILEY. When you vote for Congressmen, you vote for one member of the House, do you not? That is all you can vote for. Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes.

Senator BAILEY. One out of four hundred and thirty-five.
Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes.

Senator BAILEY. And 2 Senators out of 96.

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes.

Senator BAILEY. In an arbitration you feel that you can have a larger voice, do you not? In an arbitration you would cast vote for vote, would you not?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. In an arbitration it is left

Senator BAILEY. In an arbitration between you and the operators you would cast vote for vote.

Mr. LUNDEBERG. That is right.

Senator BAILEY. So it amounts to the difference between 50 percent and the percentage represented by 3 out of 435. That is about onefifth of 1 percent.

The CHAIRMAN. One of the objections which I had to the hiring hall-at least I had it up until yesterday, and perhaps I was convinced yesterday that I was mistaken-is the matter of rotation, or the rotary plan that would preclude the shipowner from maintaining certain selected members of the crew who have been satisfactory to him. Does that actually work out in practice?

Mr. LUNDEBERG, No.

The CHAIRMAN. A man cannot be put on the beach?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. That is absolutely not true. A man can stay aboard ship as long as he wants to. Nobody tells him to get out. If he wants to stay there 10 days, or 10 years, that is up to him, and if the shipowner wants to keep him for 10 years, that is all right. He can stay there. If the shipowner wants to fire him, the man is fired. The CHAIRMAN. Suppose that the man the shipowner wants to keep is not a member of the union. What about that?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. On the Pacific coast today there is no man going to sea who is not a member of the union, and the new men who start to go to sea are given ample "breaks" from our union to become members of the union. Young boys are coming around every month, highschool boys, and so forth, who want to go to sea, and they are getting more of a break today than ever before, under our system. Before we had the control of the ships the poor boy had a hard time if he wanted to go to sea. He could not go to sea due to the fact that he had to have a pull with some official in a shipping concern. Consequently all the college boys were going to sea in the summertime, and the seaman was on the beach. In other words, when I was a greenhorn, if a boy wanted to get a job in those days, if he knew the president or vice president, or the assistant manager of a company, he could get a job, but the poor boy who did not know any official could not get a job.

The CHAIRMAN. I understand, Mr. Lundeberg, that you believe in teamwork. Mr. Mullins told me that yesterday. He convinced me that it is not true that there is a rotary system in process. He said, as you have said this morning, that so long as a man stays on the ship. so long as he does not choose to leave that crew, he has a right to stay there.

Mr. LUNDEBERG. That is right.

The CHAIRMAN. You are asking, through the hiring hall, to make replacements of the vacancies that occur at the end of the voyage, is that right?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. Is there any difference of opinion among the representatives of the seamen here in that respect?

(There were several negative responses from the audience.)

Mr. LUNDEBERG. You mentioned Mr. Mullins. I am glad we agree. I do not know the man, and we have never talked it over.

The CHAIRMAN. It must be a good standard doctrine, because that is exactly what he preached.

Mr. LUNDEBERG. I want to say this in your behalf. I have_never heard that you have ever broken any of your commitments. I have been informed that you have always been on the level in this game. Do you want to say anything more?

Senator THOMAS of Utah. May I ask one question?

When the hiring hall was controlled by the shipowners and was declared illegal by the courts, why did the sailors take the same medium for hiring, under their control? Why did they not work out some other plan?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. It is pretty hard to tell, but I imagine that there was no other plan available to us. It was at a time when we would have welcomed the Govrnment establishing the hiring hall on both coasts, run fairly. But we were never helped along those lines. As I say, it was in the period when they did not care whether we lived or died. But now we believe that we can handle it ourselves. Also, under the United States Shipping Board, when they conducted service bureaus, there was a lot of discrimination going on, and it was not on the "up and up."

Senator THOMAS of Utah. Do you think that through your control you can avoid the abuses that came into this scheme before?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Absolutely. We have avoided them right along. We have had this in practice on the Pacific coast for 3 years, and even the shipowners now are very well satisfied. They must be, because they do not complain about it. They even signed their "John Henry" to it, in all the seaports on the Pacific coast. That was a year ago. They signed the agreement that was argued out between us, and they felt that that was the best way.

Senator THOMAS of Utah. Then the abuses are not inherent in the agency itself, but in the way in which the agency is controlled. Mr. LUNDEBERG. That is right.

The CHAIRMAN. It was explained to me yesterday that these men in the union are watchful enough so that they are not going to let some dispatcher, for a 10-dollar bill, niake a wrong selection. Is not that right?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes.

The CHAIRMAN. Have you anything further, Mr. Lundeberg?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. I just wanted to make a short statement. Our organization feels that the Department of Labor is the only department which should handle any labor problems. We do not believe that we need any more boards of any kind. When the Department of Labor was established by the Government as an administrative force in the United States, it was established for labor and employers to go in there and get their troubles settled. It is suggested that we should have some more boards. We believe that we belong in the Department of Labor. We have been getting a break from the Department of Labor. Sometimes we do not like certain things, but

32437--38-pt. 7-4

other times we do. As I stated before, I think it was the Department of Labor which talked the shipowners into meeting with us when the last strike was successfully ended.

The CHAIRMAN. That was largely a matter of mediation. There is nothing in the law, so far as I have been able to find out, that gives any authority to the Department of Labor. That is rather interesting, but that seems to be the fact. In the law of 1936, the so-called Copeland Act, the Labor Department is mentioned. That is, à report should be made to the Labor Department. But there was no description given, and nothing was put in the law to indicate why or what the Labor Department was to do. Are you aware of that situation?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes; I am aware of that situation. I know they can act as mediators. At least, they have done so time and again out on the coast, agreeably to both parties.

The CHAIRMAN. And you think they did a good job?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes. Of course, it is not compulsory. It is not compulsory that we take the Department of Labor, but both parties have from time to time agreed to ask the Department of Labor to send a man out there, and they have done a pretty good job. The CHAIRMAN. Have you something further to offer?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. That is all.

Senator BAILEY. If we created this board of mediation, and then provided that it should be used only when both parties agree, would you object to it then?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes. We would object then, too.

Senator BAILEY. You would not have to take it if you did not want to?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. It is too easy a step to get something added to it. In other words, you might establish it under those conditions, but a year after something might be added to the law. I believe that the relations between the seamen and the shipowners should be handled directly between themselves, and the men are so bitterly opposed to the establishment of any mediation board beyond the industry that it might create a worse situation than exists now. It is the same way with the hiring halls. If you establish hiring halls now under a different situation, I imagine the men would refuse to take a job from there. That would be the sentiment of the men, and everything would be more or less tied up.

This is nothing new to these men. They have discussed it back and forth, and they have had experiences with it. Those are their ideas on that subject. We are getting into a state too closely resembling the situation they have in Germany, Italy, and Russia, where a man is told what to do, whether he likes it or not. There is danger of democracy turning into fascism, or something elsewhatever they call it. It is the same thing under different names. Senator BAILEY. That is the result of this general policy of centralizing control at Washington.

Mr. LUNDEBERG. That is right.

Senator BAILEY. You had a written statement. Do you wish to put your written statement in the record?

Mr. LUNDEBERG. Yes. I should like to put it in the record.
The CHAIRMAN. It will be included in the record.

(Mr. Lundeberg submitted the following material for inclusion in the record:)

STATEMENT OF THE OPPOSITION OF THE MEMBERSHIP OF THE SAILORS UNION OF THE PACIFIC TO THE PROPOSED SENATE BILL 3078 TO AMEND THE MERCHANT MARINE ACT OF 1936

The membership of the Sailors Union of the Pacific sent me to Washington, D. C., to voice their opinion and sentiment against the proposed Mediation Act for Seamen.

We have analyzed Maritime Commissioner Joseph P. Kennedy's report to the Senate and House committees and we would like to state our reaction to these statements.

In order for the Congressmen and Senators to get the right slant on our side of the question, it is necessary that we bring in a little back history.

HISTORY

The Sailors Union of the Pacific is the oldest maritime union in the field. It was organized in 1885 in San Francisco. From 1902 to 1921, the Sailors Union of the Pacific was recognized by the shipowners as the bargaining agency for the seamen. Our organization had direct negotiations for the seamen with the shipowners. During this time, practically all of the shipping of seamen was done through the offices of the Sailors Union of the Pacific. In 1921 the wages established through direct negotiations between the union and the shipowners was $90 per month, $1 per hour overtime, and an 8-hour day-the highest wages seamen had ever had.

At that time, in 1921, the United States Shipping Board was the largest shipowner in the country. They, together with the other shipowners, made drastic demands for the cutting of wages for the seamen. When the seamen refused to accept these wage cuts, the Shipping Board and the shipowners locked out the seamen. This lock-out lasted from the month of May to August; this lock-out was also on a Nation-wide basis. Through the combined efforts of the United States Shipping Board and the shipowners, the seamen were beaten and the unions were crippled.

During this period the shipowners, the Pacific American Steamship Association, together with the Ship Owners Association of the Pacific, joined the Waterfront Employers Union and started operating what they called the Marine Service Bureau, an employment agency which furnished strike breakers during the lock-out. After the lock-out was over, the unions crippled, and the men forced to flock back to the ships, they found out that some of the most militant men were blacklisted through this so-called Marine Service Bureau which demanded that every seaman register through this so-called fink hall before they could get employment.

From that time on and up to 1934, the shipowners had things their own way. During this period wages and conditions went from bad to worse. The estabIshed 8-hour day was done away with and wages were cut time and time again. Shipping was done through these fink halls and conditions going to sea got so bad that a lot of good seamen, real seamen, stopped sailing. The policy of the shipowners in operating these halls was not to question the ability of the men, or their background, but rather their one question was: "How cheap will you work?" Thus lots of bad elements got into the industry and bona fide seamen either left the sea or the ones who stayed had to keep their mouths shut for fear of getting blacklisted.

In 1924 the Sailors Union, together with the International Seamen's Union, attempted to alleviate their conditions by political action and backed La Follette in his campaign for the Presidency. When this attempt failed we took our case to the courts. All to no avail.

During this period men were driven away from the union and were demoralized by the conditions under which they had to work. These conditions existed during the so-called boom years-1924 to 1929-when wages in all other industries had risen to their greatest heights. Living costs had risen accordingly and seamen had to meet the rising cost of living with decreased wages, due to the fact that they had no economic weapon-a strong union to protect them.

In 1928 the Jones-White bill was passed by Congress which gave the shipowners large loans from the Government at a very low rate of interest, in order that they might build ships. After the ships were built Congress gave them large mail subsidies. During this time Congress passed laws to help the shipowners to build ships and giving them fat subsidies, but nothing was done for the seamen.