The article reported that “the chief executive officers at the nation’s five largest oil companies—Exxon, Mobil, Texaco, Standard of California, and Gulf, in that order—got increases averaging about 16 percent last year, which brought their pay bonuses, on average, to almost $740,000.”

This was bitter news to members of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) still out on strike.

While most oil companies have settled with OCAW, thousands of Texas oil workers remain on the picket line. The longest national oil strike in the country began last January 8.

Throughout the strike, the oil barons have used every means to intimidate and weaken the union, including court suits and injunctions, police harassment, and threats of disciplinary action. Now their fire is concentrated on the group of locals holding out.

At the giant Gulf refinery in Port Arthur, OCAW’s biggest local, 4-23, is hanging tough against the company’s attempt to take severe disciplinary action against some union members.

The membership refuses to consider Gulf’s contract offer until the company agreed to take everyone back. The company has not met with the union since mid-March.  
 
May 2, 1955
As the strikes of some 80,000 Southern telephone and railroad workers pass their 45th day, there is a growing awareness of their great significance for all organized labor in the U.S.—North and South.

Victory or defeat in these two strikes will not only play a vital role in determining the future of unionism below the Mason-Dixon line but can have a decisive bearing on the mounting number of strikes throughout the country and on the coming negotiations of the auto workers with Ford and General Motors.

In the Southern strikes the corporations have chosen to challenge the very basis of unionism in a fashion that recalls the union-recognition strikes of the early CIO. For example, the Louisville & Nashville railroad and its seven affiliated lines has refused to accept a health-welfare plan awarded by a presidential fact-finding board a year ago.

Eight months of negotiations produced a deadlock between the CIO phone workers and Southern Bell. The latter demanded a no-strike clause, claiming it had suffered 105 wildcat strikes in the past four years. The union agreed on condition that in return a clause for arbitration of all disputes be put in the contract. The telephone monopoly rejected this as an invasion of the “rights of management.”  
 
 
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