Labor Goes Along-- for Now

President Nixon's plans for continuing wage-price restraint after the freeze ends Nov. 13 passed their first major hurdle last week when labor leaders agreed to go along with Phase II--at least for a while. The A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive council decided to let five labor representatives sit on Nixon's proposed Pay Board, which will also have five business and five "public" members. The board will set general rules for pay increases and hear pleas for exemptions.

Essentially, the labor leaders only agreed to play along for a time with the President's ideas and see what happens. At the start, A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany had talked tough and insisted that union chiefs would sit on the Pay Board only if it was to be independent of any veto by Treasury Secretary John Connally's Cost of Living Council. Then Nixon obliged Meany by penning the initials R.N. on a memorandum stating that the COLC will "monitor" the Pay Board's decisions but "will not approve, disapprove, veto or revoke" them.

Contradictory as that language sounds, it offered Meany a chance to participate in the program without publicly eating his words and he took the chance posthaste. Meany warned, however, that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. will not consider member unions bound to forgo strikes or court challenges against Pay Board decisions. In addition, he announced that A.F.L.-C.I.O. unions around the country will set up "watchdog units" to constantly check on how much prices rise during Phase II.

In other developments last week:

> The White House encountered difficulty choosing public members for the Pay Board and Price Commission: several prospective appointees turned down bids either because they lack the time or are opposed to controls. One rumor was that Nixon would ask W. Allen Wallis, chancellor of the University of Rochester, to chair either the Pay Board or the Price Commission.

> Nixon himself added yet another piece to the already complex machinery for rule-making and compliance. He proposed creation of a three-judge Temporary Emergency Court of Appeals to rule on company or union protests against Pay Board or Price Commission verdicts. Appeals from the TECA's decisions would go directly to the Supreme Court.

> Herbert Stein, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers and one of the men who put together the Phase II machinery, told members of the Business Council that "a temporary upsurge of prices is possible in the first few weeks or even months" after the freeze. Said he: "There are a number of more or less legitimate or at least hard-to-resist claims for price and wage increases that have backed up" during the freeze so far.

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