LABOR: Peace Terms

The spine of the nationwide steel strike was broken.

For days the welcome news had swooped and skittered on the horizon like a distant barn swallow. This week, rumor became fact. Bethlehem Steel Co., the nation’s second greatest steel producer, had come to terms with Philip Murray’s striking C.I.O. United Steelworkers.

A speedy end of the 31-day steel strike in the rest of the industry seemed inevitable. Other big steelmakers—Jones & Laughlin, Republic, Youngstown Sheet & Tube—were ready to follow Bethlehem’s lead. The little steel companies had little chance once the chink appeared in the industry’s front, were almost sure to sign with the Steelworkers and get their blast furnaces and open hearths roaring again. U.S. Steel, the kingpin, could hardly afford to hold out longer with Bethlehem gone from the struggle.

The paralyzing strike had started Oct. 1 over “a matter of principle”: Should the steel companies foot the whole bill for employees’ pensions and insurance (as proposed by President Truman’s fact-finding board), or should the Steelworkers chip in for some of the cost? But as time passed, as distress hit the steel towns and major segments of U.S. industry began to stifle for lack of steel, Phil Murray and Bethlehem decided to get down from abstract principle and talk cents.

For nearly a week, meeting quietly in New York City, Murray and Bethlehem’s tough and practical President Eugene Grace hammered out peace terms. The company, which for 26 years had provided employees with free pensions (now $50 a month at 65), would increase them to $100 a month and bear all the cost (an estimated 9¢ an hour, in contrast to the fact-finders’ proposed 6¢. Murray agreed in turn to have Bethlehem’s 80,000 workers pay half the cost of a new 5¢-an-hour insurance and hospitalization program.

It was a pattern which, with a few cents’ variation here & there, would presumably fit the rest of the struck steel industry comfortably, and Phil Murray had timed it well. In Cleveland, where he had a lot at stake this week, Phil Mur ray and jovial, ruddy Joseph Larkin, a Bethlehem Steel vice president, walked smiling into a roomful of steelworker negotiators to break the news. Then, serenaded by workers’ cheers and loud singing, they called a press conference to explain the settlement. President Murray was able to walk into the C.I.O.’s highly charged annual convention with a great big confident smile.

With the toughest half of the double-header strike in steel and coal out of the way, the U.S. turned optimistically to idle soft-coal fields. John L. Lewis, who had been waiting for steel and the Steelworkers to settle, was expected to have his 380,000 United Mine Workers back in the pits in short order.