Unhappy Birthday

Just before dawn one morning a year ago, cars sped up to the factory gates of the Kohler Co. in Kohler, Wis. Out jumped scores of determined men who promptly began picketing the plant. Last week the same union pickets shuffled along the sidewalks at the plant gates, as the United Automobile Workers strike against Kohler of Kohler celebrated its first unhappy birthday. It is one of the longest-lasting major strikes in the U.S.

The specific strike issues are now obscured. What started as a walkout over ordinary union demands--for a 20-c- hourly wage hike, a union shop, seniority rights, arbitration of grievances--has turned into an old-fashioned finish fight between the nation's No. 2 union and its No. 2 plumbing-fixtures manufacturer. The union vowed war "until doomsday." Said Kohler: "No outsider can determine our operation."

Persistent Paternalism. The Kohler Co., founded in 1873 by Austrian Immigrant John M. Kohler, has always been something of a maverick. Family-owned, the bathtub barony answered to no outside board of stockholders, and had its own policy toward the hired help. Walter Kohler Sr., second-generation boss of the firm, housed Kohler workers in a beautiful model town, but would not give his workers the right to bargain collectively. An A.F.L. strike for union recognition in 1934 cost two lives, saw the strikers stone and dent the Kohler plant's front door, brought in the National Guard, ended with the union defeated (see cut). Eighteen years later labor attacked again, and this time breached the porcelain-hard curtain: the U.A.W. won an NLRB election, recognition as the employees' bargaining agent and a contract which the U.A.W. called "inferior."

But last year, when the U.A.W. tried to improve its contract, the Kohler guard was high as ever. Company President Herbert Kohler, 63, who succeeded his late brother Walter, turned down mediation pleas even from his own nephew, Walter Jr., the governor of Wisconsin.

Continuing Strike. Last week, despite the strike, a steady stream of artillery shells, precision instruments, pink washbasins and peach bathtubs flowed off the Kohler assembly lines. The company hinted that it had 3,000 men at work, as against 3,300 before the walkout, said it was operating at a profit. The union conceded that Kohler had 1,800 employees at work, but claimed that 2,800 of the 2,850 U.A.W. members who walked out last year were still holding out. The strike had already cost the union some $4,000,000 in benefits--$25 weekly to each striker for "jingling money," plus rent and food vouchers. Cost to the union was rising by $350,000 more each month--and there was no settlement in sight.

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