Against the Union Shop

Handsome Courtlandt Gross, 58, chairman of Lockheed Aircraft Corp., is a man of principle, and one of his strongest principles is that every one of his 70,000 workers should feel free to join a union but that none of them should be compelled to do so. Four times in the last decade Lockheed has taken costly strikes rather than bow to the demands of the International Association of Machinists for a "union shop," i.e., compulsory union membership. Last week, still clinging to principle, the nation's largest defense contractor took yet another strike which, for 36 hours, tied up its operations from Cape Canaveral to Honolulu.

Pentagon Pressure. Lockheed's stand was made in the face of uncommon pressure. Last September a presidential fact-finding commission recommended that the emotion-charged union shop controversy in the aerospace industry be settled by putting it to a vote of the workers in each aerospace company. The committee specified that a two-thirds majority would be required for approval of the union shop, and it looked as though Lockheed could scarcely lose such a vote: little more than half its eligible workers are union members, and the union shop idea has recently been voted down at North American Aviation, Ryan Aeronautical and Convair. But Gross would have nothing to do with any election that might force a man to join a union or lose his job. "A basic freedom,'' Gross argued, "is not something to be voted away.''

Official Washington was openly annoyed by Gross's position. President Kennedy made no secret of his view that if a strike occurred, the blame would rest with the company. When the union inevitably did call a strike, the Pentagon at first hinted that it would remove some contracts from Lockheed's $1.5 billion backlog of defense orders, then threateningly said it would issue no new ones except with specific approval of the service secretaries.

Last Offer. As production ground to a near standstill last week on Lockheed's vital output of Polaris missiles, antisubmarine planes and Agena space boosters, the Administration felt obliged to change its tune. Reluctantly, President Kennedy invoked the Taft-Hartley law, aiming at a court injunction that would end the strike for an 80-day "cooling-off" period. At that, the union hastily called off the strike--temporarily.

At week's end, the Administration still planned to press for an injunction, despite its unhappy recognition that the move would undercut the union's bargaining position. The Taft-Hartley Act provides that unless a contract is signed within the first 60 days of the cooling-off period, the workers must then vote on the company's last offer. Lockheed's last offer was to give its workers an average wage increase of 21-c- an hour between now and 1964--but no union shop. And the betting was that if this were put to a vote among Lockheed's workers, Court Gross's chances of winning a majority would be middling good.

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