LABOR: Model in Reverse

Labor’s offensive against the Taft-Hartley Act hit Detroit. John L. Lewis had won one battle with a coal contract which had laid a few detours around the new law (TIME, July 21). Last week the C.I.O.’s lusty, restive United Automobile Workers opened up on the Ford Motor Co. U.A.W. made Ford a test case in a fight to get unions out from under any responsibility for wildcat strikes. U.A.W. wanted a clause in its contract specifically releasing the union from the law’s provisions that unions may be held financially responsible in court actions for failures to control the membership.

No Guinea Pig. Henry Ford II called the proposal “a disastrous precedent for scuttling . . . the law.” He would not become “a guinea pig . . . for all industry.” Ford’s negotiators would agree to setting up an impartial umpire who would determine whether the union had made “prompt and honest” efforts to prevent illegal walkouts; Ford would not sue if the umpire said they had made the efforts. No, said U.A.W. to that.

Detroit was already feeling the pinch of another dispute over the issue of a “no penalty” contract. A two-week strike of 7,000 workers at Detroit’s Murray Corp., which supplies body panels, frames and other parts, had already forced Ford to lay off 26,800 workers. The Murray strike had also forced Studebaker (at South Bend, Ind.) to lay off 10,000; the stoppage was backing up into other auto plants.

“No Penally.” The U.A.W.’s soft-voiced vice president, Richard T. Leonard, tried hard to soft-pedal the “no penalty” issue. The union’s negotiators were making a lot more noise about Ford’s shiny new model for a pension plan. Six weeks ago, when Leonard himself proudly announced the plan, almost everybody cheered. The plan was a first long step toward old-age security for thousands of auto factory workers (TIME, July 7).

Leonard and other U.A.W. leaders now charged that the company had “reneged,” that the pension scheme which the union was asked to sign was not the same as the one promised; parts had been added, parts left out. The union accused the company of downgrading its initial participation from an original $200,000,000 to about $180,000,000; of cutting an understood $15,000,000 in annual contributions to the fund about in half; of refusing to give the union a voice in administering the fund.

No Matter. Lanky John S. Bugas, Ford’s industrial relations chief, hotly denied that the company was welching on the original “gentlemen’s agreement.” But, since the U.A.W. had brought the plan up as a strike issue, the company would also use it as a club; it threatened to withdraw the whole scheme. The union set a strike deadline. A long strike would surely cost the workers the shiny pension model which Ford had offered them. This week the strike was postponed pending more negotiation. But the threat of a struggle neither side wanted remained.