Target

On his 60th birthday, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther last week presided over a meeting of his lieutenants. He emerged with the information that Ford would be his union's "target company" in negotiations that, if they break down, could lead to a strike this week. Those negotiations almost certainly will break down, and the strike is more than likely to take place. "We made the decision not with our hearts but with our heads," Reuther said in explaining why the U.A.W. wouldn't tackle the giant, General Motors.

For seven weeks, bargainers from the U.A.W. and Detroit's Big Three had nattered back and forth over negotiating tables. Not until early last week did G.M. Negotiator Earl Bramblett hand U.A.W. Vice President Leonard Woodcock a 22-page booklet titled Summary of General Motors Proposals to the U.A.W. for a New Three-Year National Agreement. A few minutes later, negotiators for Ford and Chrysler made almost identical offers.

General Motors Vice President Louis G. Seaton, speaking for the industry, described the package as "a sizable offer and a big one. It would result in the largest wage increase ever offered the U.A.W." It look the union only 24 hours to reject the proposals as "inadequate and inequitable."

Faced with sagging profits and mounting costs (Chrysler last week announced that prices for its 1968 cars will rise by an average $125, whatever the outcome of the labor-management battle), the industry did in some ways seem generous. By their own reckoning, the Big Three offered a package that would amount to a 5.2% annual increase in labor costs. Wages would go up by 13-c- an hour during the first year, by an average of 12-c- an hour during each of the next two years. For the typical G.M. worker, who earned $7,885 in 1966, this would boost take-home pay by $315 the first year and by about $280 during each of the next two.

Despite such seeming largesse, the industry's offer could hardly be taken seriously except as an initial bargaining position. Almost completely ignored were such key Reuther demands as a guaranteed annual wage and parity between U.S. and Canadian workers. And the union leaders thought that the automakers were downright insulting in their suggestion to put a ceiling on U.A.W.'s cherished cost-of-living escalator clause.

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