LABOR: Stand on Principle

“I get nervous just sitting around,” grumbled a striking steelworker in East Chicago, Ind. last week. “I wish I could grab the guys on both sides of that table and bang their heads together.”

A few days later, the President of the U.S. all but fulfilled the steelworker’s wish by summoning the top men on both sides of the steel strike to the White House for head-banging sessions. “I am getting sick and tired of the apparent impasse,” Ike told his press conference, and “so are the American people.”

“Two-Way Street.” Some kind of presidential intervention in the strike was plainly necessary. It had dragged on into the longest nationwide steel strike in U.S. history. The huge steel inventories piled up in warehouses when the strike began back in mid-July had dwindled so drastically that manufacturers were starting to schedule layoffs for lack of steel. A dozen appliance manufacturers warned that they would have to shut down completely by mid-October unless the strike ended.

Opposed on principle to Government interference in collective bargaining, Dwight Eisenhower had given the steel companies and the United Steelworkers of America plenty of time to arrive at a settlement. Since last May, on and off, Steelworkers President Dave McDonald and U.S. Steel Executive Vice President R. Conrad Cooper, head of the industry negotiating team, had glared and snapped at each other across the bargaining table in Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hotel without making any detectable progress.

What kept both sides from budging was the steel industry’s determination to turn collective bargaining into a “two-way street,” as Cooper put it. In most big strikes in the U.S. since World War II, the fight was about the difference in size between the package management offered and the package the union demanded. But this time the steel industry brought to the bargaining table not an offer, but some demands of its own: contract changes to give management more control over conditions in the mills. Most important change demanded by industry: revision of the standard contract’s Section 2-B, which deals with the work rules—varying from one mill to another—that govern such matters as the number of men needed for a particular task and the extent of management’s authority to shift men around. Charging that the rules now foster “featherbedding and loafing,” industry wants to add to Section 2-B a provision that “nothing in this contract shall prevent management from improving the operating efficiency of its plants.”

“Industrial Dictatorship.” Management’s insistence on tinkering with Section 2-B was in one sense a stand on principle, but in another sense it was a lucky break for the steelworkers’ Dave McDonald. After seeing most of their postwar wage gains canceled out by price upcreep, rank -and-file steelworkers were wary of following McDonald into a strike for higher wages. But when industry negotiators started talking about changing work rules, steelworkers began heeding his warnings that the bosses wanted to bring back the bad old days of “industrial dictatorship” and “assembly-line slaves.”

With the rank and file backing him up, and with other unions contributing as rarely before to his strike kitty, McDonald could refuse even to discuss revision of 2-B at the bargaining table. Result: total deadlock. Last fortnight, denouncing the negotiations as a “farcical filibuster,” McDonald walked out.

The breakoff of negotiations with steel supplies running out and ripples of unemployment spreading across the land cracked Dwight Eisenhower’s already worn-thin patience. “I am not going to permit the economy of the nation to suffer, with its inevitable injuries to all,” he told his press conference. “I am not going to permit American workers to remain unnecessarily unemployed.”

Imperiled Health. At the White House two days later, the President met with U.S. Steel Chairman Roger Blough and five other top steelmen for half an hour, then with McDonald and three other United Steelworkers officials for about 20 minutes. At the closed-door meetings, said Press Secretary James Hagerty, Ike “did most of the talking,” and was “quite firm.” Later that day, the President issued a statement hinting that if the two sides failed to reach agreement by the time he got back from his vacation in California, he would invoke the Taft-Hartley Act’s provision calling for an 80-day back-to work period when a strike threatens to “imperil the national health or safety.”

Shaken by the President’s intervention, Blough and McDonald agreed to resume negotiations—this time in Pittsburgh instead of New York. Management finally got around to making the union a money offer to chew on. But it was a small offer, totaling about 8¢ an hour in added benefits as against McDonald’s demand for a 15¢ package. And at the same time the steel industry stuck determinedly to its insistence on contract changes, including revision of 2-B.