LABOR: Capitalists’ War

Commercial aviation’s first big labor crisis (TIME, Oct. 28) was more exasperating than an adolescent quarrel. Transcontinental & Western Air, Inc., third largest U.S. airline, continued to thrash about on the ground last week with its striking pilots’ union. Neither gawky T.W.A. nor the Air Line Pilots Association, the Little Lord Fauntleroy of the A.F.L., wanted to be first in hollering uncle.

A.L.P.A. President David Behncke stuck stubbornly to his wage demands. The pilots were asking four-figured annual salary increases for flying the bigger payloads of trickier, four-motored transports. T.W.A.’s President Jack Frye stood equally firm. Overseas expansion and expensive troubles with the Lockheed Constellation (TIME, July 22) had already stretched

T.W.A. resources thin. Frye claimed that the thread would snap under aheftier payroll. He asked the Government to take over and keep the cash register ringing.

In Washington, Chairman Frank Douglass of the National Mediation Board knocked heads together. But days of private confabbing failed to spin a single propeller. Without notice, T.W.A. laid off nearly 15,000 employes (worldwide*) and broadly hinted that the highly paid pilots were taking bread out of the mouths of lower-paid mechanics, clerks, stewardesses, et al. Many of those locked out took the hint and picketed pilots’ homes (see cut).

First & Only. But brash tactics did not unnerve slow-talking Dave Behncke. A onetime stunt flyer in the days when bamboo and baling wire passed for an airplane, he was prepared to sweat out the storm. It had been building up since he quit United Air Lines eleven years ago to become A.L.P.A.’s first and only fulltime president (salary: $12,000).

He had fought vigorously to tighten safety regulations and had developed a tight organization for the highly skilled specialists, whose careers are abruptly over the day they fail a physical. Today all but a handful of pilots among the major airlines pay A.L.P.A.’s initiation fee (up to $100) and dues (up to $100 yearly).

Soon after V-J day Behncke had stated his contention that his union pilots rated brand-new pay scales on the bigger, faster planes of the postwar era. Pay rates—computed on a complicated formula covering mileage, speed, and hours in the air —had not been basically revised since a 1934 decision of the National Labor

Board. Weather delays and scheduled stopovers often kept pilots from logging maximum flight earnings. Behncke turned down a compromise suggested by a presidential factfinding board last July, held out for the equally unwieldy principle that each new design off the drafting board demanded a new formula.

Scanning the dispute, C.I.O. President Phil Murray called it “a row between capitalists.” T.W.A. was finding out that capitalists, too, could be tough.

-In Paris, T.W.A.’s 200 employes fared better. Under regulations of the French Ministry of Labor, a full month’s notice must precede a layoff. T.W.A.’s Paris branch still remained on the payroll.