Renewz > & Regret

For three days last week in a guarded suite in Manhattan's Biltmore Hotel, the operating executives of U. S. Steel Corp. and the general staff of the Steel Workers Organizing Committee went through the motions of negotiating a new contract-- the most important single labor contract in the U. S. The immediate destinies of Big Steel's 200,000 employes had already been settled in quiet, personal chats between Myron C. Taylor and John L. Lewis. And what Messrs. Taylor & Lewis decided will probably go for the other 300,000 steelworkers now covered by C. I. O. contracts.

Neither Mr. Taylor nor Mr. Lewis attended the Biltmore conference. This year, as last, formal negotiations were left to those two sons of pick-&-shovel coal miners--Laborman Philip Murray and Steelman Benjamin Franklin Fairless. With the aid of their respective delegations, they simply put in black & white the generalities previously agreed upon. For the union, the new contract is not so favorable as the old. In the face of Recession's realities, John L. Lewis had been forced to yield ground.

All basic provisions of the old contract were retained--seniority, paid vacations, a basic $5 a day, a 4O-hour week with time-and-a-half for overtime. But instead of running for a full year, the new contract may be reopened on ten days' notice by either side, and if no agreement is reached within the next 20 days, the contract lapses. In effect, this means that U. S. Steel may, at any time, ask the union to accept a wage cut, and if the union does not accept, proceed to put the wage cut into effect. Under the straight one-year agreement wages could not be cut during the life of the contract.

If the steel industry were operating at 80% capacity instead of 30% as it is, this escape clause might be ignored by the steelworkers as an immaterial legalism. But both John Lewis and the steelmasters have proclaimed the indivisible relationship of wages and prices. And a few hours before pens were put to the Big Steel contract, price-cutting broke out in Little Steel, with the announcement of a $4-per-ton reduction on cold-rolled sheets, an important item to the automobile industry (see p. 63). If price-cutting becomes general, U. S. Steel and the rest of the 500 companies which are expected to renew their C. I. 0. contracts on the same terms would very probably invoke the escape clause for a general wage cut.

Mr. Lewis tried to put the best face he could on the contract with an optimistic declaration thai: "it preserves the current wage structure." But he devoted most of his statement to his old line of buttering up Steelman Taylor. Said Laborman Lewis: "The fact that our minds were able to meet on questions of principle and policy is a tribute to Mr. Taylor not only as a leader of industry but as an American devoted to the furtherance of ration,: relationships and national stability. . . ."

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