Meany for Nationalization

George Meany, the labor gerontocrat, maintains a continuing devotion to the free-enterprise system. Even so, next month he plans to lift his gruff and powerful voice to insist that Congress nationalize the country's troubled railroads. "Looking around the world at railroads that are under government control and seeing the type of service they give, I say it's not too bad," argues Meany. "We are not doing very well under private management right now in this country."

At the quarterly meeting of the A.F.I..-C.I.O. executive council on Feb. 15. Meany will ask his union federation to endorse nationalization. The council is almost sure to back him. His legislative staff KS already drawing up a nationalization bill that sympathetic Congressmen will then introduce. Meany's intention is to counter another bill, pro posed by President Nixon, calling on Congress to bar railroad strikes by ordering compulsory arbitration.

Union men would do almost anything rather than lose their ultimate weapon, the strike. But not all of them agree with Meany that their salvation lies in nationalization. It may be easier to wheedle raises out of Congress than out of the rail companies, but nationalization would lead to consolidation of lines and a cutback of jobs. All that is hardly an immediate possibility, however, if only because Congress would need some $60 billion simply to buy out existing rail companies. Though nationalization is too radical a step for Congress to take in a single term, Meany hopes to get the subject before the public.

Whichever tactic Congress selects in this session, the present method of handling rail labor disputes will change. Negotiations now follow steps laid out meticulously in the Railway Labor Act of 1926. If talks bog down, the act allows a presidential fact-finding board to forbid a strike and mediate the dispute. "Knowing that the Government will ultimately step in," complains Labor Secretary James Hodgson, "each party is reluctant to do any meaningful bargaining in advance." By the time the halfhearted negotiations reach the strike stage. Congress usually has to vote a special act to keep the railroads in operation. Lawmakers are tiring of such last-minute rescues. Last month, to halt a strike that would have stopped all the nation's rail traffic. Congress imposed an 80-day cooling-off period. When that expires March 1 and the unions are free to walk out again, Congress will probably be more interested in Nixon's hardline arbitration plan than in Meany's dreams of nationalization or any scheme that might perpetuate crisis bargaining.

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