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discharged and a company union imposed. After unsuccessful negotiations, the
Distillers struck. The strike ended when the company agreed to meet the workers
demands. The company reneged on its deal, however. Finally in August 1937, the
Distillers Workers prevailed, when the NLRB ordered that the discharged
employees be rehired with back pay and that the company union completely
disestablished. "
The AFL was also successful in the remarkably assertive, though small-scale
campaign mounted by Local 40 of the American Federation of Musicians. The
local insisted that only union musicians were permitted to play private parties at the
hotels, and when the hotel management refused to comply, it mounted a three
month campaign that included a strike, a mass rally sponsored by the BFL, a
boycott of the hotels involved (even the Philadelphia orchestra refused to stay in
these hotels when it was in town playing elsewhere), and an endorsement from
Mayor Jackson. The hotel management and the musicians finally agreed to a
compromise solution right before the Christmas season. But probably the most
portentous news on the AFL front was the continuing aggressiveness of the
Teamsters Union, which pushed hard in its struggle against Diamond Cab, despite
numerous arrests, violence, and the installation of a company union. Teamster
leader Harry Cohen ended up going to jail for three months, thereby becoming an
AFL cause celebre? *
Despite the stirrings in AFL ranks, the qualitatively different postures of the
AFL and CIO in the Baltimore region in 1937 can be see in the practice of their
regional bodies. The Maryland-District of Columbia Federation of Labor
convention, held in Hagerstown in May, was largely reactive to the CIO. Before
the convention, federation president Joseph McCurdy announced with fanfare that
none of the ClO-affiliated unions that were members during the previous year's
convention would be seated; none even showed up. Plans for a smooth convention
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