Trying to Earn Enough

Last week Teamsters Local 282 in New York City negotiated a rich new contract that calls for a $57.60 weekly wage raise over the next two years.

The pay of drivers of sand, cement and gravel trucks will rise to $266.80 for a 40-hour week by July 1971; on top of that, fringe benefits will go up $44.40. The benefits include a pension plan that allows a Teamster to retire on $400 a month after 20 years of driving, whatever his age.

Lavish as it is, the most striking thing about the Teamsters' contract is that it is not really unusual. The Labor Department calculates that wage-and-benefit settlements in this year's first quarter provided a 5.9% median yearly in crease. But a number of contracts signed in the last few weeks have increases equal to or greater than the Teamsters' 28%. Pacts negotiated recently are designed to raise wages and benefits 25% over three years for waiters in Seattle, 39% over three years for West Coast sawmill hands and a gargantuan 49% in 13 months for construction workers in Lorain, Ohio.

Even proposed wage increases of that size no longer always win union acceptance. Ironworkers in St. Louis have been on strike for six weeks against an employer offer to lift their wage-and-benefit package from $6.03 to $9.03 an hour over the next five years. The union likes the money, but does not want to sign any contract that will bind it for more than three years.

Over a Barrel. Many of the big contracts have been signed by employers who either felt no pressure to keep prices down, or had no choice in a labor-short economy. Construction unions, which often have more strength than the localized employers they deal with, are leading the way, but many another union is delighted to exercise some un accustomed economic muscle. Seattle hotel and restaurant employees won their increases after a 12-day strike that was settled just as the first of 100,000 Shriners arrived in the city for a convention.

New raises are enabling some traditionally underrewarded workers to catch up. In New York City, for ex ample, the poorly paid public-school teacher is a figure of legend. Last week the teachers' union ratified a contract that, by 1972, will give some top mem bers $16,950 -- for 40 weeks' work a year. Raises averaging 9.1%, which took effect last week, will bring the pay of two million U.S. Government civilian employees up to what their counterparts in private industry were collecting a year ago. A deputy bureau commissioner in a large department, for instance, goes up from $30,239 to $33,495, his third in crease in two years. Some Government employees have now had six raises in the past three years.

In many cases, however, the game of catch-up threatens to turn into an inflationary game of leapfrog. The 49% increase achieved by Lorain construction workers was intended to bring their pay and benefits by next summer up to levels prevailing in nearby Cleveland. But Cleveland building unionists, seeking to restore their primacy, now vow to press for a still larger raise in negotiations next spring.

To make matters worse, wages are rising much more rapidly than workers' productivity, as measured by the Commerce Department. As a result, labor costs per unit of output are climbing steadily. Manufacturers are compensating by raising the prices of their products. Thus, even large pay raises have yielded little if anything in added purchasing power. During the last three years, in fact, the purchasing power of the average U.S. worker has done no better than hold steady. Union leaders now feel that they must push for giant wage and benefit increases to keep their members ahead of price boosts. But some are aware that the raises may only give the inflationary spiral a further upward twist. Says Phil Stack, a New York Teamsters official who helped negotiate the $57.60 hike: "Every time we get a raise, the prices increase and the hospitals go up as well. Somebody should stand still. If the others stopped, I think our men would be happy to stop too."

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