A Course Apart

New York City's hapless Democratic Mayor Robert Wagner tried, and failed. New York state's Republican Governor Nelson Rockefeller tried, and made no visible progress. Then, on the day after he was sworn in as U.S. Secretary of Labor, longtime Union Lawyer Arthur Goldberg flew to Manhattan to make his own effort toward ending the railroad-tugboat strike that had stranded some 100,000 commuters and stalled railroad travel as far west as Chicago. After 14 hours behind closed doors with union and management negotiators, Goldberg emerged triumphant--and next day the trains began to run again.

"In the National Interest." Goldberg came armed with a potent weapon. President Kennedy, he said, felt that a strike settlement was required "in the national interest." Key to the truce: management and the three striking unions led by the Seafarers agreed to delay a decision as to which side should fix the size of work crews; they would wait a year for recommendations from an Eisenhower-appointed commission on railroad work rules, headed by former Labor Secretary James Mitchell.

The same basic idea of waiting had been alternately proposed and rejected by both sides before Goldberg arrived. He won agreement by arranging for the Mitchell Commission to consider the tugboat dispute separately and promising that the federal, state and city governments would prod labor and management alike to heed the commission proposals. Clearly, the Goldberg settlement marked a victory in politics and public relations for the Kennedy Administration and set it on a course apart from the Eisenhower Administration in labor policy.

"Blood on Their Teeth." President Eisenhower had held firmly that the Government should stay out of labor disputes unless a national crisis was at hand. (One crisis: the 116-day steel strike of 1959-60, when Vice President Nixon pressured behind the scenes for a settlement.) To interfere in lesser cases, Ike believed, can weaken collective bargaining by tempting either side to stall in hope of getting a better deal through Government intervention--as during the Truman era, when labor made many breakthroughs at the cost of higher prices.

Labor was beginning to look forward with anticipation to the Kennedy era. Said Seafarers Union Skipper Paul Hall of the tugboat strike: "The railroads got the hell kicked out of 'em. Now that the railroad brotherhoods have seen this, they got blood on their teeth. They will be a helluva lot tougher."

So, too, may other unions be tougher. As Secretary Goldberg left Manhattan, the militant National Maritime Union was leading 3,500 nonrailroad tuggers in separate negotiations and holding out for wage boosts of 33 1/4%. The tuggers threatened to call a far greater strike this week, stop most of the fuel shipments into the city and prevent most ocean liners from docking at the world's busiest port.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.