Steel at Bat

For five months U.S. Steel Chairman Benjamin F. Fairless and David J. McDonald, boss of the C.I.O. United Steelworkers Union, have been hard at work understanding each other's problems. Taking time from their jobs, they made two-or three-day tours of some 40 steel plants together, talked to everyone from shop foremen to open-hearth workers, and got along famously. Last week in Pittsburgh, McDonald, who looks more like a corporation tycoon than Ben Fairless himself, presented his union's wage demands to U.S. Steel. Ben Fairless got a rude surprise. The demands were far stiffer than expected.

Before getting down to specifics, the union's 50-man negotiating board brought up unemployment. It reported that some 16% of the industry's 1,200,000 workers in the U.S. are out of jobs, and asked Big Steel to boost production. Though the steel operating rate has been rising in recent weeks (current rate: 70%), the union talked "crisis," proposed "a six-hour day with eight-hour pay." That out of the way, the union laid out sweeping proposals adding up to an estimated 50-c--an-hour increase.* Items:

P:A full union shop and a general wage boost.

P:Bigger pensions (up from $100 a month to between $170 and $185 for workers retiring at 65 after 25 years of service) and a health program which would increase sick benefits from $26 a week for 26 weeks to $50. Every worker would get a $5,000 life-insurance policy and complete hospitalization.

P:A guaranteed annual wage to give every laid-off worker a weekly paycheck equal to 32 times his hourly pay rate, e.g., $70.40 a week for a worker making $2.20 an hour v. the $88 he would earn in a normal 40-hour week.

U.S. Steel promptly called a two-week recess to study the proposals. Chairman Fairless, who himself took a slight pay cut (from $261,200 to $258,000) last year, said that he wanted to settle peacefully and quickly. But falling demand has forced Big Steel and the rest of the industry to cut output in 1954, and they are in no mood to shoulder heavy additional costs. The Steelworkers themselves were not talking strike. Said a union spokesman: "These are things we have outlined for discussion . . . That does not necessarily mean that it is our price for industrial peace."

-- General Electric this week offered its employees a 5-c--an-hour increase. In Detroit 1,250,000 C.I.O. United Auto Workers will take an automatic 1-c--an-hour pay cut because of a drop in living costs in April.

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