Cyrus S. Ching (May 21, 1876 – December 27, 1967) was a Canadian-American who became an American industrialist, federal civil servant, and noted labor union mediator.
[1] On October 31, 1899, Ching moved to Boston, Massachusetts, and took a job as a clerk with the West End Street Railway.
Ching had warned management that 11 years of frozen wages, lack of communication and general disregard for workers' issues would lead to a strike.
The Mayor of Boston, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, and the Governor of Massachusetts, Eugene Foss, accused the president of the company of bribing state legislators to obtain favorable treatment.
But workers at U.S. Rubber remained by and large satisfied with working conditions, and unionization made little inroad among company employees.
William S. Knudsen, chairman of the National Defense Advisory Commission, asked Ching to mediate a dispute at a Bethlehem Steel factory in upstate New York.
When the union struck in February 1941, Bethlehem Steel executives demanded that the governor crush the strike using the New York Army National Guard.
[1] President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Ching to the National Defense Mediation Board (NDMB) in early 1941.
[4] A later panel overturned the ruling in 1942, but Ching continued to espouse a philosophy of consensual collective bargaining rather than government imposition in employer-union relations.
[6] Passage of the Taft-Hartley Act over President Harry S. Truman's veto on June 23, 1947, established the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service as an independent agency.
John R. Steelman, Assistant to the President of the United States (the office later became the White House Chief of Staff), asked Ching to head up the new agency.
[1][8] He also spent much of his time fighting off attempts to put FMCS back under the authority of the United States Department of Labor.
[9] Ching is said to have popularized the famous quote about the downside of wrestling with pigs: “A man in the audience began heckling him with a long series of nasty and irrelevant questions.
[11] After departing FMCS in September 1952,[12] President Dwight Eisenhower asked Ching to lead a panel which would arbitrate labor disputes at Oak Ridge.
[1] Cyrus Ching published his memoirs, Review and Reflection: A Half Century of Labor Relations, in 1953.
[14] A partial scholarship was endowed in 1956 in honor of Ching at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.
At his death, AFL-CIO president George Meany noted, "He contributed as much to the cause of industrial peace and labor-management understanding as any man of his generation.