The Big Strike

A sooty fog lay heavy over Pittsburgh. Smoke seeped into the steel and concrete canyons of the Golden Triangle, bringing the lights on early in the long rows of office windows. Occasionally a puff of snow swirled up from the grimy sidewalk:.

In the Gold Room of the Roosevelt Hotel, the atmosphere matched the dismal day. The air grew thick with tobacco smoke, thick with angry words. The 175 top officers of the United Steelworkers were cooking up a strike already approved by their membership. After meeting all day they came to a decision: the strike would start at 12:01 a.m., Jan. 14.

The Steelworkers might as well have announced that resumption of peacetime production must halt, for in the switchover from a wartime economy steel is the key. The Steelworkers, now the largest union in the U.S., have more than 800,000 members, contracts with 1,100 plants which make not only steel ingots but such more or less related products as nuts & bolts, thermometers, radiators, hardware, motors, refrigerators, kitchenware, paving bricks, caskets. More than 3,000,000 other U.S. workers depend on steel furnaces for the raw material which keeps them busy.

Nothing Fancy. The trouble in steel, most explosive along the labor-industrial front, was also the easiest to define. The Steelworkers' Phil Murray, brought up on the simple facts of life of the coal pits, never indulges in the fancy-Dan kind of economic debate that complicates the career of the United Auto Workers' Walter Reuther.

Although he has come to hate his old boss John Lewis, Phil Murray still runs his own union on an old-fashioned Lewis principle: keep your men together with a firm hand, get them as much as you can. There has never been any factional politics or Communist finagling in the Steelworkers' Union. Its funds, double-checked, audited and published twice a year, go solidly into the union treasury instead of into such social service experiments as summer camps and solariums.

Murray has never declined the helping hand of Government, which helped him get his original Big Steel contract in 1937 and his contract with Little Steel in 1942. He was a regular visitor to the White House in Franklin Roosevelt's administration. But he still thinks labor should stand on its own feet. His philosophy: "What the Government gives the Government can take away." He has become wary of Harry Truman.

Characteristically, Phil Murray said nothing about examining the steel company's books or debating the ins & outs of the profit system. He simply wanted a $2-a-day raise for his men, to keep their take-home pay around its $56-a-week wartime average. He firmly believed the companies could pay it without raising prices, but he would just as soon not argue the point; prices were a matter between the companies and OPA. And the $2 figure was subject to compromise anyway.

Something Furious. Despite Phil Murray's advance notice that he would be happy to dicker, despite the steel companies' implied hint that they might be willing to raise wages if the Government would only let them raise prices, both sides girded furiously for battle. For the next few weeks it would be fought with handouts.

The American Iron and Steel Institute put on a publicity campaign by claiming, in newspaper ads, that the union's contract contained a promise not to strike. In rebuttal Murray had Legal Counsel Lee Pressman draw up an elaborate opinion which argued that the no-strike pledge applied only to grievances, that the contract specifically provided for reopening the wage question. He accused the industry of "determined arrogance"--a phrase which is rapidly becoming labor's cliche of 1946.

Yet somehow all the words, all the violent threats and stubborn refusals, had an empty sound. This was one place where Harry Truman, despite his hands-off policy, would probably have to intervene, and where Phil Murray and the steel companies would have to accept intervention.

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