Your Insurance Salesman

Life-insurance salesmen are generally of as generous (they always pick up the tab when they are trying to sell something), compassionate (no one would weep more bitterly should a client die) and patient to a fault (they never take no for an answer). Yet recent events suggest that beneath those Jekyll-like exteriors lie rather tough Hydes.

In mid-May, 6,500 agents of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, the largest after Prudential, went on strike for higher commissions and bigger retirement and pension funds. At one point, a settlement seemed near. But that was before the strikers began to toss bricks through windows of Metropolitan's headquarters in Manhattan, throw knives around the cafeteria and generally terrorize nonunion agents.

That conduct caused the company to fire 13 of the worst offenders. Last week tension reached a new high and tactics a new low. The Insurance Workers International Union's local in New York happens to belong to the Maritime Port Council, which acts as an umbrella for many small unions. So when 1,000 white-collar pickets gathered outside the Met offices, they were joined out of sympathy by 700 burly dock workers. The sales men and longshoremen marched through the streets chanting the peace demonstrators' slogan, "Hell no, we won't go." In this case, they meant that they would not leave the street and go to the sidewalk. To encourage them to do so, 150 policemen moved in with night sticks at the ready. Six hours after the demonstration began, two policemen and two demonstrators had been injured and six had been arrested. Of these, four were insurance agents, which suggests that salesmen can be just as tough as any dock worker.

Though the strikers and management had worked out most of the fine print for a new contract by week's end, policyholders were still mailing in their premiums, and the agents, who have no strike fund, were still living off past commissions. In many cases, this was no particular hardship, since a hard working and fortunate agent can make $100,000 a year.

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