What Nobody Wanted

One day back from his vacation in southern California, President Eisenhower met the somber group of Cabinet members and aides who trooped into his White House office at 8 a.m. last week. Among them were Labor Secretary James Mitchell, Attorney General William Rogers, Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson, Commerce Secretary Frederick Mueller. All listened quietly while Mitchell reported some bad news to the President: labor and management had made no progress toward settling the longest nationwide steel strike in U.S. history. That left only one thing to do: President Eisenhower set into motion the machinery of the Taft-Hartley law, aimed at halting the strike by injunction for 80 days to provide a cooling-off period. He named a three-man committee of labor experts to write the fact-finding report required by law (see box) before the injunction can be obtained.

Earlier in the week from California, the President had invoked Taft-Hartley in the East and Gulf Coasts dock strike that had idled some 70,000 workers. But to Dwight Eisenhower, the necessity of using Taft-Hartley in the steel strike was far more distressing, and he put his feelings into the announcement of his decision. Wrote the President: "I profoundly regret that the parties to the dispute have failed to resolve their differences through the preferred methods of free collective bargaining, even though every appropriate Government service was available to them in support of their efforts." The President pointed out that 500,000 steelworkers and 200,000 workers in allied industries were out of work, and steel shortages would soon cause a fast spread of layoffs in the rest of the economy (see BUSINESS). He did not mention another ominous fact, reported to him by the Pentagon: shortages of special steel had begun to slow down construction work on submarines and missile bases.

Stop & Go. What exasperated President Eisenhower was not the actual failure by steel management and labor to reach agreement, but the halfhearted, stop-and-go manner in which they had negotiated. Last week after urgent personal requests from the President that they get down to serious negotiating, labor and management met over a coffee table in Pittsburgh's Penn-Sheraton Hotel. The session followed the same pattern of dull do-nothing that had characterized all the previous negotiations. U.S. Steel Chairman Roger Blough pointed to the management's offer of a "15-c- wage package," stuck by his demands for revision in union work rules (TIME, Oct. 12). United Steelworkers Union President David McDonald, who had walked out of a previous session, declared that the package really contained only 10.2,-c- refused even to discuss changes in the work rules, tagged the whole business "putrid."

Despite a massive exchange of press releases and newspaper ads about the wage package, the real issue was still not wages but the work rules set up twelve years ago by Section 2-B of steel's standard wage contract. Management demanded change because the rules foster "featherbedding and loafing." The management demand solidified union ranks, raised howls that a change would let "stopwatch pirates come into the mills and set speed-up practices." Neither side made a clear case. Steel has no record of flagrant featherbedding; as compared to the same period in 1951, U.S. Steel produced a million tons more in the first half of 1959 while cutting its work force from 301,000 to 241,000. But by McDonald's own admission, at least 100,000 workers in the steel industry still owe their jobs to the work rules, and would lose them if real efficiency could be enforced by steel management.

Health or Safety. In an effort to break the work-rule impasse last week, Secretary Mitchell held secret meetings with both sides, proposed a commission to arbitrate rules on a company-by-company or plant-by-plant basis. McDonald talked as if he would buy the suggestion--if the union had a vote on the commission. But management rejected the suggestion and thereby angered Administration officials. "Hell," snapped one, "they're now trying to get back from labor a good deal of what they themselves have given away over the last 15 years."

The failure of Mitchell's effort left the Administration no choice but to use its power under the Taft-Hartley law. It was a solution that pleased nobody. Dave McDonald vowed to fight the injunction proceedings in the courts, arguing that the steel strike has not yet endangered the national health or safety, the only basis on which the law permits an injunction to be issued. Industry had precious little to gain from the use of Taft-Hartley either; management could hardly expect to get topflight production out of the angry workers ordered back to their jobs.

But President Eisenhower was not worried about whether labor and industry approved his decision. He had a far more basic interest in mind, and he had expressed it through Press Secretary James Hagerty: "The situation is not collective bargaining, which is the instrument open to a free people in major economic disputes. This seems to be getting down more and more to a trial of strength between two groups with the American public the greatest loser. I might add the President has no intention of letting the American people be the greatest loser."

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