Labour Relations If these measures show what the administration means
to do, and now has power to do, for the workers, another event of the last week shows what it has enabled them to do for themselves. Last Friday the first important ballot was taken under that provision of the Wagner Labour Relations Act which gives the workers in any industry the right to choose a union to represent them for purposes of collective bargain- ing. By 17,000 votes to 7,000 the Steel Workers' Organising Committee, affiliated to Mr. Lewis's Committee for Indus- trial Organisation, secured the right to represent the workers in the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, and immedi- ately presented a wage contract for signature by the company. It was the Jones anl Laughlin Corporation which challenged the validity of the Wagner Act and lost a case before the Supreme Court. This victory for the principle of industrial unions, as against craft-unions, reflects the growth of the Steel Workers' Organising Committee as a whole, which now claims to represent soo,000 of America's 570,000 steel workers; and there can be no doubt of the impulse given by the Wagner Act to the growth of Mr. Lewis's move- ment, which is now a political and industrial force of the greatest significance. - As if to symbolise the end of one era and the birth of another, last Sunday saw the death of Mr. John D. Rockefeller, whose fabulous fortune was amassed by methods which the "New Deal" is designed to make impossible.
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