A Whiff of Chaos

For more than three months, Congress searched in vain for a formula to head off a railroad strike. Last week it faced the urgent task of ending one.

Defying the Administration--just as it had during last summer's $3 billion, 45-day airline strike--the militant International Association of Machinists triggered a walkout that laid off 600,000 rail employees and paralyzed 95% of the nation's 216,000-mile rail network. Lyndon Johnson, in no mood for a repetition of the airlines debacle, called the strike a "national crisis" and urged Congress to take immediate action. Swiftly, the House and Senate found the formula that had eluded them for so long. Barely 48 hours after it had begun, the first nationwide railroad strike in 21 years was over.

"GoGo Union." While most railroad unions accepted 5% increases months ago, the Machinists and five other shopcraft unions held out for more. Dubbed the "gogo union" by its president, P. L. ("Roy") Siemiller, 63, the Machinists, whose $2.90 average hourly wage is far lower than what other industries pay for comparable work, wanted 6.5%.

There had been a whole series of ac tions to stave off a strike. When the last postponement ended June 19, the unions pledged not to strike. But a Johnson-proposed bill, imposing a binding settlement if no voluntary accord was reached, got hung up for a month in a Senate-House conference committee. With the matter still unresolved, the Machinists finally walked out.

No Photographers. Brief as it was, the strike furnished a foretaste of the chaos that might have been. In New York and Chicago, some 300,000 rail commuters either turned to car pools and buses or stayed home. Near Los Angeles, 1,600 boxcars loaded with perishables were rushed to refrigerated storehouses. Across the U.S., 400,000 rail cars were stranded.

Johnson summoned congressional leaders to the White House on Sunday to demand quick passage of the Administration bill still languishing in conference committee. The next day, both houses complied. When Johnson signed the bill into law, photographers were conspicuously absent. Only once before--in 1917--had Congress ordered striking workers back on the job, and the President was not anxious to remind his labor supporters of his role.

Specifically, the bill created a five-man panel to mediate the dispute and, if no agreement emerged in 90 days, to impose a settlement that would be binding until Jan. 1, 1969. In naming the panel, the President surprised everybody by including A.F.L.-C.l.O. President George Meany. It came as a still greater surprise when Johnson named as chairman Oregon's Democratic Senator Wayne Morse. For one thing, he is one of L. B. J.'s peskiest Viet Nam war critics. Moreover, although Morse is an old hand at labor mediation, he won the implacable enmity of the Machinists' Siemiller as the Johnson-appointed mediator in the airline strike.

To labor, the formula for an imposed settlement sounded suspiciously like compulsory arbitration, though the Administration called it "mediation to finality." Whatever its name, the plan was another in a line of stopgap solutions. As such, it pointed up the need for Johnson to make good on his 18-month-old promise to propose permanent legislation against crippling strikes. For, notwithstanding congressional--and presidential--squeamishness on the subject, the fact is that in some strikes, as the President himself said last week, "the public interest must take precedence over private interests."

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