Cyrus S. Ching

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. He was the first director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service (FMCS) and the Wage Stabilization Board.

Early life Ching was born on his father's farm in Prince Edward Island, Canada on May 21, 1876. The Chings were of Welsh heritage (the family name was originally spelled Chynge). He was the only boy in a family with eight children.

Ching was educated in a one-room schoolhouse. When he was 16, he was a spectator in a local courtroom, and the experience inspired him to become a lawyer. He attended Prince of Wales College, a college preparatory academy, after a well-off uncle paid for his high school education. He transferred to a local business college and studied bookkeeping and stenography. In 1895, he left Prince Edward Island to work for an Albertan grain elevator company. Ching, however, saw unionization coming. Although the United Rubber Workers (URW) had made few inroads among the company's workers, Ching met with URW and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) organizers and arranged for card check elections at U.S. Rubber factories. Unionization of the company proceeded without the acrimony observed at other rubber manufacturers, and contracts were quickly signed. 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.

President Roosevelt then named Ching to the War Labor Board, the NDMB's successor. He served from February 1942 to September 1943, then returned to U.S. Rubber. Ching retired from the company in August 1947.

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. Ching initially refused, but Truman himself asked Ching to direct the new agency in order to forestall congressional opposition to funding the new agency. Ching served until the end of the Truman administration. During his time in office, Ching advised Truman to invoke the Taft-Hartley Act during a strike at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in December 1947, and mediated several important strikes—including the 1949 steel strike, the 1949 Hawaii dockworkers' strike, and several coal strikes. He also spent much of his time fighting off attempts to put FMCS back under the authority of the United States Department of Labor.

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. For a while Ching answered patiently. Finally he held up his big paw and waggled it gently. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘I’m not going to answer any more of your questions. I hope you won’t take this personally, but I am reminded of something my old uncle told me, long ago, back on the farm. He said. ‘What’s the sense of wrestling with a pig? You both get all over muddy . . . and the pig likes it.'”

Ching took a leave of absence from FMCS in October 1950 to head the Wage Stabilization Board, a Korean War-era agency created in September 1950 to limit wage increases and help stabilize the economy as defense mobilization ramped upward. He was the agency's first director. He quit the Board in April 1951 when President Truman reconstituted the panel, and returned to FMCS.

After departing FMCS in September 1952, President Dwight Eisenhower asked Ching to lead a panel which would arbitrate labor disputes at Oak Ridge. Ching agreed, and remained head of the arbitration panel until his death. A partial scholarship was endowed in 1956 in honor of Ching at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations.

In 1961, the Dept. of Labor presented Ching with its Award of Merit for his service in labor-management relations.

Ching died at his home in Washington, D.C., of a heart attack on December 27, 1967. 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."