Effects of the Strike

"They're starting to hit us heavy this week," said Township Trustee Harold F. DeVault as he looked out at 175 Gary, Ind. steel strikers lining up in a drizzling rain. "Everybody is starting to apply for relief."

Not only Gary's workers, and not only steelworkers needed help. As the steel strike went into its fifth week, the whole steel-based economy of the U.S. began to slow down. The auto industry had already laid off 91,200 of its 1,200,000 workers. In Cleveland, Toledo, Buffalo and Atlanta, auto assembly plants began closing down. In Flint, Mich., the two Chevrolet plants laid off 10,000 men, AC Spark Plug 8,000, Buick 200. In the whole U.S., besides the 475,00 striking steelworkers, an estimated 250,000 others were out of work because of the strike, and other thousands soon would be. The strike's cost to date:

P: 6,000,000 tons of steel.

P: $1 billion worth of steel products.

P: $250 million in wages.

Worse still, the strike had shut down the Lake Superior iron mines at the height of the ore shipping season, creating the prospect of a new steel shortage next winter for lack of ore. Even if the strike ends soon, the industry will have trouble making up the lost ore.

Steelmen and steelworkers made little progress toward ending the strike. President Truman, determined not to invoke the Taft-Hartley law, had called Government mediators out of the negotiations. Both sides were still deadlocked over Phil Murray's insistence on the union shop, although there were some signs that management's opposition to this was cracking. Bethlehem Steel, which had been the first to break management's front in the 1949 strike, offered, then hastily withdrew, an informal compromise on the issue.

Pittsburgh Steel, twelfth biggest U.S. producer (capacity: 1,072,000 tons), came to terms with the union. It agreed to a modified union shop (new employees must join the union but can quit within the first month) plus an increase of 12 1/2-c- an hour, v. 15-c- recommended by WSB. Just as promptly, National Steel's Ernest T. Weir, who has fought the national union, handed out a bigger raise (16-c-) to the 13,000 members of his independent union, who hadn't struck. Murray, picking off smaller mills one at a time, last week claimed that 50 plants had granted the full WSB award. But these plants produce only 15% of U.S. capacity.

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