Breaking Steel's Separate Peace

Ore miners test the no-strike agreement

The steel industry, once noted for hard-fought strikes, has for most of the past two decades been a model of labor tranquillity. In 1973, the United Steelworkers even formally surrendered the right to strike the basic steel industry over "economic" (wage and benefit) issues; in a widely hailed Experimental Negotiating Agreement (ENA), it pledged to submit pay disputes to binding arbitration. But last week more than 14,000 iron-ore miners shattered steel's separate peace by walking off their jobs in Michigan and Minnesota. It was the first substantial strike in any segment of basic steel in 18 years, and if long continued could be crippling. Mills can get by for some months by feeding stockpiled ore into their blast furnaces, but eventually they will need fresh supplies--and the strike has shut down nearly 90% of U.S. ore production.

How could the walkout occur in an industry governed by a no-strike pact? ENA permits strikes over local issues, like job assignments, and some of these are involved in the ore walkout. But the big issue is a miners' demand that they collect incentive payments for increased production, as 85,000 workers in steel mills do. To U.S.W. officials in Pittsburgh, who gave their permission for locals at twelve mines to strike, whether any particular mill or mine grants incentive payments is a local issue, unrelated to the general wage level set by national contracts negotiated under ENA. To the companies, that argument is sophistry: in their view the miners simply want bigger raises than were granted by the national steel contract signed last spring, and that is an economic issue if there ever was one. Steel industry attorneys are in the process of preparing a breach-of-contract suit against the union, asking for damages.

A court battle could only increase doubts about the future of the no-strike agreement. It cannot be scrapped until 1980, and nobody wants to go back to the days when strikes or threats of strikes led stockpiling steel users to step up their purchases of foreign metal. But, says one steel executive, if interruptions like the ore strike make customers feel insecure, "the whole purpose of ENA is defeated." On the union side, the walkout dramatizes the feeling of some militants that giving up the strike weapon emasculates the union. Ed Sadlowski made that argument vehemently in his losing campaign for U.S.W. president last winter, and he had many supporters on the Mesabi Range, who are now bracing themselves for a long walkout. Says one 31-year-old striker: "This strike is about union dignity."

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