LABOR: Magic Formula

Phil Murray knew a good thing when he saw it. His steelworkers’ new contract with the Bethlehem Steel Co. was a juicier plum (by 2½¢ or 5¢ an hour) than the union had previously hoped to win from the struck steel industry. From now on, the complicated “Bethlehem Formula,” would be the basis for the steelworkers’ terms.

When Colorado Fuel & Iron Corp. served notice that it was ready to talk business, Murray delegated Joe Molony, a district director, to negotiate with them.

“I’m going to New York,” explained Molony, with a grin, “and I’ll see the Colorado Fuel & Iron people. I’ll say to them, ‘We want the Bethlehem formula.’ They’ll say to me, ‘What is the Bethlehem formula?’ “Then I’ll pound the table and I’ll say, ‘What the hell you trying to do—break the union?”

High Hopes. Thus, with high hopes, the United Steelworkers set out last week to deal with steel companies who, after five strikebound weeks, were making conciliatory sounds. In contrast to the simple 10¢-an-hour plan proposed by President Truman’s fact-finders and rejected by industry, the new formula required four typewritten pages of “simplified” explanation by the union. The steelworkers would pay some of their wages—2¼¢ an hour—into the insurance half of the fund, with Bethlehem chipping in another 2½¢ an hour for each worker. But the company would have to pay by itself the cost of a liberal pension plan, guaranteeing all 65-year-old steelworkers with 25 years of service minimum retirement pensions of $100 a month. Some would get more. This, Murray estimated, would cost Bethlehem 10¢ or 12½¢ an hour for each of its 80,000 steelworkers. In turn, the steelworkers were abandoning fourth-round wage demands for another year.

Merry Chase. The prospect of peace in steel let the U.S. Government turn its attention on John L. Lewis, whose seven-week-old soft-coal strike had passed the pinching stage and was really hurting. In Washington last week for a clandestine meeting with Federal Mediator Cyrus Ching, John L. was in a sullen but athletic mood. For 45 minutes he led newsmen on a comic-opera chase through midtown Washington, waddling through side doors and around corners like an amateur Sydney Greenstreet, climbing in & out of taxicabs, bouncing up & down in elevators.

At one point, big John angrily kicked the camera in a news photographer’s hand. Later he turned on his harassers. “You can’t make a hippodrome out of this,” grumbled the hippodramatic leader of the United Mine Workers. “You are interfering with my private business.”

Just what his business with Ching was, John L. was not saying. But irritable John L. was plainly anxious for a sensible settlement of his costly strike.