--Milwaukee, December 27

1. FOUR weeks ago, in a stinging rain, picketing began in the first large white-collar workers' strike of the New Deal. After weeks of futile advances to the Boston Store management, more than 600 of the store's 1,000 employees struck. The pickets are still marching, the strike is still on, though the United States Department of Labor and the national, regional, and local labor boards have done their utmost to stop them, though the A. F. of L., through its state officers and counsel and a personal representative of William Green, has urged them to give in to terms of defeat. A victory, all sides agree, will lead at once to higher wages and better conditions in other Milwaukee stores, including the Gimbel Brothers and Sears Roebuck chains; a victory will be the beginning of the abrogation of the vicious national retail code with its starvation wages. Defeat for the Boston Store strikers may easily kill the efforts of all store employees to better their intolerable conditions for years to come. None know these truths better than the employers. Through their widely circulated daily and weekly papers the powerful mercantile interests of the country are exerting the pressure that no doubt led to the sending of numerous peace emissaries from Washington and Chicago. Locally the other large stores have aided their stricken competitor against the common enemy by furnishing him with lists of extra employees and closing their eyes to price chiseling.

2. Needless to say, the local press has given the management the benefit of all doubts. Such news items as the throwing of stink bombs that routed customers and an amazing march through the store of thirty women shoppers sympathetic to the strikers were not mentioned. The all important news that the federated trades council had placed the Boston Store on the unfair list got only a paragraph at the end of a long statement by store officials, copied from their advertisement in the same issue. Moreover, this blacklisting, though it was announced on Saturday, did not see print until Monday, when the store's advertisement also appeared.

3. In spite of the overwhelming forces against them, the strikers have to date been surprisingly successful. Their vigorous picketing utterly ruined the store's Christmas trade. Its officials admitted a drop of 30 per cent in sales from the same period of last year-this at a time when other Milwaukee stores were piling up huge increases over last year.

4. The attitude of the store management has been provocative; its statements have been uniformly distorted or untrue. It began by furnishing a list of all strikers to the police and instructing new employees to report to the police at "the least sign of disturbance." In a full-page advertisement it falsely stated that the international of the clerks' union had outlawed the strike, and boasted that it was paying the full $14 a week code minimum to all full-time employees. The League of Women Shoppers, a group organized independently to aid the strikers, called a meeting to tell the public the strikers' side. About eight hundred persons attended. Mrs. Victor L. Berger was chairman. Eight strikers told their reasons for walking out. Income-tax reports were quoted showing that in 1933 four officials of the store received salaries and dividends totaling $149,000. Strikers said they were living better on county relief than they could on their salaries.

5. The strike is in fact a strike in behalf of all store employees against the miserable retail-trade code, written by the powerful interests, administered by all-employer boards, approved by the government, and upheld by a press which depends on the good-will of the big stores.