Pattern for 1949

At exactly 2:02 o'clock one afternoon last week--less than ten hours before the deadline--word reached the steelworkers' Pittsburgh headquarters: Big Steel had capitulated. The creeping threat of a shutdown in the nation's most basic industry was suddenly lifted. His face lined with the strain of waiting, 63-year-old President Phil Murray called in the newsmen: "We are delighted to be able to say that the strike has been averted."

Then Phil Murray broke into a broad grin. From there in, he figured to win. For the next 45 days Government fact-finders, picked by Harry Truman, would take over.

Murray did not think they would find against him.

White House Help. Five days before, Federal Mediator Cyrus Ching had stalked out of a negotiating session, throwing up his hands in despair. Actually the mediation meeting had lasted only 2 1/2 hours. Phil Murray, out for big game, refused to budge from his insistence on discussing pension demands (although, under the contract, he was only entitled to open wage and insurance negotiations this year). Profit-fat steelmen* as stubbornly dragged their feet on wages as long as the union wanted to talk pensions, too. At that deadlocked point, Murray looked hopefully to the White House.

While the steelworkers met in Pittsburgh to authorize a strike, the President put on the squeeze. In identical wires to the six major steel companies, he proposed a board of inquiry which would make recommendations on settling the dispute. U.S. Steel Corp.'s stiff-necked Ben Fairless turned it down flat. The Taft-Hartley Act, he pointed out, "is still the law of the land," and it expressly states that a fact-finding board shall be forbidden to make recommendations. The other steelmen took the same line.

The President came right back. He did not invoke the national emergency sections of Taft-Hartley, he said, because there was no "immediate peril" with so much steel around. His idea was to find a solution before matters reached a critical state. Said the President: "Surely you are not afraid to have your side of this dispute examined in the public interest." Again, Fairless & Co. refused the presidential request.

Fact-Finding Formula. As the hours ticked by, big blast and open-hearth furnaces began shutting down. Coke ovens were banked. But under the combined pressure of the White House, public opinion and the dark prospect of a full shutdown, some of the smaller steelmakers capitulated. Then Bethlehem and Republic, junior partners in steel's Big Three, followed suit.

Thus isolated, U.S. Steel reluctantly gave in. Wiring his acceptance to the President, Fairless clung to one reservation: "We understand this ... to mean that there is no moral or legal obligation upon us to accept any recommendation which this board may make."

Fairless, of course, knew as well as anyone that he would have a hard time resisting any formula produced by the fact-finders--it would have too much public pressure behind it. The men Harry Truman picked had a pro-labor cast: Judge Samuel Rosenman, the old New Deal ghostwriter; New Jersey Industrial Lawyer David L. Cole, a middle-road Republican who helped to settle last year's coal dispute; Northwestern University's Professor Carroll Daugherty, a longtime labor economist and friend of unions. What they decided about increases for steelworkers would do much to shape the whole pattern of labor negotiations everywhere.

*U.S. Steel's sizable 1948 profits, after taxes: $129,600,000.

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