Semisettlement

After a month-long shutdown and three weeks of deadlocked discussions, the Order of Railroad Telegraphers last week ended its strike against the Chicago & North Western Railway. For farmers and factories along the C. & N. W.'s 10,702mile, nine-state route, the settlement came none too soon. Since 1,000 telegraphers walked out to protest the elimination of small stations--and the obsolescent jobs in them--by the fourth longest U.S. railroad, the Midwest has lost millions in unshipped crops and unfilled orders.

The settlement that was finally reached in Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz's Washington office in some respects favored the railroad. But neither C. & N. W.

Chairman Ben Heineman nor Telegraphers' Chief George E. Leighty would yield on the strike's key question: the union's demand for the right to veto future job cutbacks. This and other unresolved issues will be submitted to binding arbitration this week by a three-man team (Heineman, Leighty and Lawyer Sylvester Garrett, chairman of the U.S. Steel-Steelworkers' arbitration board). The arbitrators will probably hew to a policy recommended by an Administration fact-finding board last June. It proposed union-management consultation on payroll cutbacks, came out against a union veto, but urged adequate compensation for discharged employees (to which the C. & N. W. has already agreed).

The arbitrators' decision, due next week, will concern not only the 103-year-old C. & N. W. but other big U.S. railroads and unions as well. Since the telegraphers first began to fight job elimination on the C. & N. W. five years ago, the union has requested a job-protection clause from 33 other railroads that hope to cut back featherbedding and padded payrolls. Other nonoperating railroad unions, faced with similar work losses among their members, are prepared to ask similar protections and privileges if the telegraphers win the arbitration. Thus the final C. & N. W. settlement may set a far-reaching, industrywide precedent.

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