Back to Work

The jam was broken. The new White House wage-price formula gave the steel industry a $5-a-ton price increase; the industry promptly gave its workers an 18 1/2-c--an-hour raise.

Pickets tore up their signs, threw the scraps in the air, went off to celebrate a settlement that meant about $32 more a month in each man's pay envelope. In Homestead, Pa., smokeless for 26 days, they quickly made some smoke by burning their strike placards, accidentally setting their picket shack afire.

The nation's biggest and most costly strike (about $80,000,000 in steel wages alone) was ended. The rush was on to get production going.

By week's end, as steelworkers heated up ovens, furnaces and pits, the strike skies were clearing fast. Negotiations with General Motors, which had been broken off in an outburst of union bitterness, were close to the settlement point. The month-old strike of 175,000 electrical workers at General Electric and Westinghouse seemed to be running out.

The cost of the strikes was not yet paid in full. It would take ten days for steel production to get really started, perhaps ten more days to reach full operation. Ford Motor Co., where 40,000 workers were out for lack of steel, would take at least two weeks to get back to normal production level. Some smaller manufacturers might take considerably longer.

But the worst was definitely over. The nation, worried for months by strike talk, crippled for weeks by strike realities, could settle down to business--at least until further developments on a threatened telephone walkout and the possibility that John L. Lewis might call a coal strike when his contract expires, April 1.

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