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The skyscraping settlements of the construction unions long stirred public resentment, whetted the aspirations of the rest of organized labor and created nightmares for Government inflation fighters. The hardhats' demands became so economically disruptive that early in 1971 President Nixon set up the Construction Industry Stabilization Committee. Manned by four representatives each from management, labor and the public, who meet in Washington only one day a week, the group has operated with an unorthodox autonomy that has ruffled some Pay Board bureaucrats and pooh-bahs from nonconstruction unions. Yet after 20 months of free-form negotiations, Committee Chairman John Dunlop, a Harvard dean who talks more like a pipe fitter than a pedagogue, can justifiably say of the nation's oldest wage-control apparatus: "We've done a lot better than I thought we would or most other people thought we would."

The rate of pay increases in construction has been cooled from 15.6% in 1970 to 10%-11% last year to 5.7% this year. Costly strikes have been reduced from one in every three contract expirations in 1970 to one in eight today. The greatest force for effectiveness is Dunlop, a missionary's son who became an economist. As dean of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, he supervises 2,000 academics and, when the university set out to recruit more able young professors a few years ago, he was chosen to be chairman of a faculty search group that was informally called "The Committee to Keep Harvard from Going to Hell." His nickname on campus is "Tiger," and with his gravel voice and fondness for four-letter words, he can and does talk tough to both labor and management. Having spent many of his 58 years studying unions, he knows as much as anyone in the nation about the fractious construction industry.

Just Us Top Dogs. Dunlop helped persuade Nixon to form the stabilization committee and then persuaded construction union leaders to cooperate. He knew that they were worried that the insatiable demands of militant local leaders were pricing unions out of the market, leading to increased use of nonorganized labor (nonunion labor accounts for about 30% of the construction work force). The committee's very existence gives national labor chiefs a justification for moderating pay demands. Says Dunlop: "We are using this mechanism to get done a great many things that responsible union leaders have known for years needed to be done." Almost from the start Dunlop has run a closed-door operation, barring the public from meetings and handing out information sparingly; in January he even stopped publicly reporting on the amounts of individual settlements.

He made union chiefs promise to attend every meeting of the committee, arguing: "No substitutes, no subordinates--just us top dogs." And he refused to be bound by a hard-and-fast guideline for pay increases. If one craft was earning far less than another in the same area, he allowed a large wage increase--30% or more in some instances. "I'm not interested in one number," argued Dunlop. "That's a lot of hogwash."

Over the months, however, he whittled down the average raises. One major aid was the committee's computer data bank, which can provide instantly the wage-and-benefit rates for every craft in every locality of the land. If one union demands an out-of-line increase, Dunlop and his fellow committeemen have strong grounds to talk it down. A goal of the committee is to bring order to construction's crazy-quilt negotiating patterns, in which union locals try to outdo each other in gaining ever richer contracts. In an industry that has 10,000 competing locals, Dunlop is striving to set up a union-management board that would settle labor disputes at a national level.

Last week President Nixon's newly named Labor Secretary Peter J. Brennan, head of the New York Building and Construction Trades Council, called for dismantling wage controls. Yet Brennan has gone along with the committee in the past and as Labor Secretary--and the committee's nominal boss--he is unlikely to try to undercut Dunlop. Both men realize that whatever progress has been made in unscrambling construction's chaotic pay pacts could only have been accomplished by forceful Government intervention in the bargaining process.

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