As Steel Goes . . .

(See Cover)

At week's end a long, black hired limousine rolled up the driveway to the East Wing of the White House. Out stepped stocky, red-faced Benjamin Fairless, president of the United States Steel Corp.

Eleven minutes later, a tall, stooped, grey man in a blue suit and maroon tie walked up the driveway, his face grave and drawn. It was Philip Murray, boss of the C.I.O. and head of its lusty United Steelworkers.

As they entered, both men were met by a uniformed doorman who took their coats and ushered them straight into the green-walled office of John Wesley Snyder, the ex-St. Louis banker who is President Truman's Director of Reconversion. The basic labor problem of reconversion had come to a head.

The steel strike deadline was only 34 hours away. The steel strike would tie up an industry on which many others are dependent. And the main issue (i.e., higher pay) was the same as that which had already provoked a motor strike and promised strikes in the electric industry, in the telephone system, in a dozen vital spots in the U.S. economy. The outcome here would probably set a pattern in labor trends for the whole reconversion period.

The first question presented was whether the nation would have to continue going through the labor pains of strikes before terms of settlement were reached. The second was how much pain, if any, the terms of settlement would mean.

Neutral Ground. Harry Truman was now hell-bent to prevent the first travail. Just the day before, Murray and Fairless had broken up a fruitless two-day conference in U.S. Steel's Manhattan headquarters at 71 Broadway. They had come closer together than ever before, but not close enough. Phil Murray, who had originally demanded a flat raise of $2 a day, or 25-c- an hour, had backed down to 19 1/2-c-. Ben Fairless, who had not made any offer before, had shown willingness to pay 15-c-.

Now, on neutral White House ground, the two combatants were met by Snyder, Labor Secretary Lew Schwellenbach and Presidential Adviser John Steelman. The five men stayed in the long, narrow office but 20 minutes. Then they moved over to the more commodious Cabinet Room, which has a connecting door to Harry Truman's office. That door stayed closed.

The conference assumed the air of a third degree. For 15 minutes the three Government men left Murray and Fairless alone, to talk things over by themselves. Then Schwellenbach took Murray aside, while Snyder talked to Fairless in the Cabinet Room. John Steelman flitted between the groups, a combined kibitzer and interlocutor. Then, as in a game of musical chairs, Snyder and Schwellenbach switched partners. Finally all five men got into a huddle again.

Four hours had passed. The conferees had got nowhere.

In his office, Harry Truman, having completed his day's business and bid the last of his callers goodbye, sat and waited.

The Summons. On the stroke of 6 o'clock, the President acted. After talking briefly to all five men, he summoned Ben Fairless to his office alone and told him, in the blunt terms of a schoolmaster settling a schoolyard fight, that he wanted the strike stopped.

Then the President called in Phil Murray. Up against presidential pressure, Murray agreed to put the strike off for a week. For the time being the President had saved the nation the agony of a great strike.

But as Murray and Fairless left the Cabinet Room and walked toward the lobby, they looked as if they had been through a bad time themselves. When Phil Murray came to the little colonnade framing the doorway, he stopped. His face was red; his eyes tired. He seemed to lean against a column as he talked. Slowly, in his soft Scottish burr, he told reporters the news. He turned to Ben Fairless for confirmation. Fairless, too, was worn out. His semi-stiff collar was sweaty and crumpled; his arms dangled loosely at his side. "I approve the statement of Mr. Murray," he said. The doorman came to help the gentlemen with their coats.

John Steelman told the newsmen: "I might say that at least one of the reasons Phil Murray looked so tired was, as he told us, that he'd had only three hours sleep in the last 48."

Quid Pro Quo. Phil Murray doubtless figured that the week had been worth its loss of sleep. Labor's objective, he had said, could be stated in three little words: "Substantial wage increases." Now it looked as if he was going to get them for his Steelworkers.

The terms of the settlement, when it came, would not be satisfactory to such labor ideologists as Walter Reuther. Leading C.I.O.'s fight in the auto industry, Reuther wanted higher wages without higher prices. But Murray, while he had argued that the steel industry could give him his raise without upping prices, had also said: "At the moment prices are none of my damn business."

Thus, in effect, he had stood aside while Government and Big Steel battled out the price question. Five days before the White House conference, the Government gave way. Although Price Administrator Chester Bowles raised fierce objections, John Snyder and Economic Administrator John Caskie Collet agreed to about a $4-a-ton rise in steel prices. The best guess in Washington was that Phil Murray might eventually get 18-19-c-.

Goal & Gamble. Phil Murray was playing the old-fashioned union game, seeking the simple objective which old Sam Gompers once described in the single word "more."

It had been a gamble. To win its objective, the C.I.O. had called, or threatened to call, strikes of some 1,500,000 workers. Meanwhile Phil Murray's adversaries, President Bill Green of the A.F. of L. and John Lewis of the Mine Workers, sat on the sidelines, waiting to see how the game would come out, knowing that a C.I.O. victory would bring raises for their workers as well.

The strikes had been bound to come; the only question was who would lead them and who would lay the pattern for settlement. After nearly four years of the wartime no-strike pledge, union officialdom was itching to show its mettle, and prove its worth to its constituents.

The rank & file was ready. During the war, the nation had had overemployment --long hours, the employment of housewives and other marginal workers who did not really care whether they had jobs or not. In the months after V-E day, much of labor had been as ready as returning servicemen to take a holiday before settling down to peacetime production.

Labor still had a seller's market. The first wave of unemployment after V-J day turned out to be a mere ripple. Even now there were only 2,000,000 unemployed according to estimates of the Committee for Economic Development. Official figures might be higher, but the number of real unemployment was certainly not yet large.

With labor's services in such intense demand, it was only human nature--and practical economics--for labor to put up its price. It was also human nature, and practical, for industry in turn to want its prices raised as well.

Middle Ground. To the postwar facts of life, U.S. labor leaders reacted in various ways. Cautious Bill Green preferred to fight the battle vicariously. John Lewis, whose best chance to regain his old place as No. 1 man is for somebody else to make a mistake, chose the waiting game. Walter Reuther, labor's high priest of economics and ideology, stepped out in front with a bold attempt to turn a simple argument over rates into a complicated economic crusade.

Less cautious than Green, less ambitious than Reuther. Phil Murray held to well-trodden middle ground. Save for two things, Walter Reuther might still be leading the C.I.O. parade.

One was the fact that the postwar decline in take-home pay, on which Reuther based his famed demand for a 30% wage increase, had stopped far short of Reuther's figure. Latest Department of Labor figures show that take-home pay for all industry dropped only from $45.45 in wartime July to $41.02 in October.

The other blow to Reuther's crusade was the fact that hardly any U.S. citizen, jingling the money in his pocket and noting the help-wanted ads, could get very worried about depression. Walter Reuther had tried to justify his demands by claiming that wages had to be kept at wartime levels to avoid deflation and unemployment. At the moment, both seemed some distance away.

This Way Out. The plain fact was that the U.S. was still in danger of inflation--until automobiles and refrigerators, men's suits and shotguns and a thousand other items started pouring out of the factories to satisfy the nation's pent-up buying urge and buying capacity.

The big problem was to get production going. Walter Reuther's arguments about looking at the books and avoiding depressions might set long-term precedents, but they were beside the point as long as labor was in an economic position to demand more pay.

Phil Murray capitalized on the main point. Stepping up with his 800,000 steelworkers, who could tie up 50% of U.S. industry if they chose, by last week he had apparently won something better than 15% and something less than a 20% wage increase. He had done so by judiciously looking away from the price problem.

Although in other cases manufacturers might be squeezed between mounting wages and price ceilings, this settlement highlighted the fact that in the long run and as a general rule a sharp wage increase still means a sharp price increase.

With industry already resigned to wage increases of upwards of 10%, the addition of a few percent seemed hardly likely to plunge the country into drastic inflation. The real problem of preventing inflation was the problem of increasing production and any price change not too abrupt was hardly likely to interfere with the process. Avoiding strikes would help the process.

Had Philip Murray fought a price rise or fought to the last ditch for a 23% wage increase, production would have suffered a definite check. As a man of compromise he had got something substantial without running the risk of winning a Pyrrhic victory--or rather, he had almost got something substantial. It remained for final compromise to be reached. There could still be a slip between cup & lip, but unless there were, the patient man with soft brown eyes and brooding face--who does not shout and rant or let stubbornness interfere with his skill as a negotiator--had won a major victory.

80-c- Beginnings. Phil Murray learned his labor lessons early. His father was president of his miners' local in Lanarkshire, on the western edge of Scotland. At six, young Phil went to his first union meeting. At ten, he gave up school and went down in the mines himself. The pay was 80-c- a day.

Phil and his father came to the U.S. in 1902. They landed on Christmas morning, spent the whole day in customs, then set out for Irwin, Pa.

Pennsylvania was the same as Scotland. Phil and his father went down into Arona mines of the Keystone Coal and Coke Co., worked nine hours a day for meager pay. Phil might have stayed there forever, except that he took a correspondence school course which whetted his ambition, and he punched a weighmaster in the nose. The punch cost him his job but made him president of his United Mine Workers local. Since then he has always been a union official--head of the U.M.W.'s Pittsburgh District, U.M.W. vice president, head of the Steelworkers, and finally president of the C.I.O.

He lives simply in a six-room brick house in Brookline, a middle-class Pittsburgh suburb. He rises early, catches a streetcar for downtown Pittsburgh, spends his day reading and conferring in the Steelworkers' office on the 15th floor of the Commonwealth Building. He lunches with office associates at Klein's Restaurant, goes home for dinner and an evening of reading in a gold-backed chair near the fireplace.

$300,000 Office. In Washington, where he spends much of his time these days, he lives in a suite at the fashionable Carlton Hotel, walks across Lafayette Park to his office in a five-story limestone building which the Steelworkers bought for $300,000 from the Republican National Committee.

On Sundays, wherever he is, he attends Mass. In Pittsburgh he goes to Resurrection Church twelve blocks from his home; in Washington, to St. Matthew's Rectory, five blocks from the Carlton. He is a good friend of Detroit's Cardinal-Designate Mooney and of New York's Cardinal-Designate Spellman. Last year he received the Msgr. John A. Ryan Award as the "outstanding Catholic layman of the year."

For years, Phil Murray played second fiddle to John Lewis in the United Mine Workers. They made a smooth-working team: after John L. had browbeaten the opposition with threats and oratory, Phil Murray came along with facts and finesse. Had it not been for John L.'s plunge for Willkie in 1940, Phil Murray might still be a second-string leader. But today he is undisputed boss of the C.I.O.

Boss's Boss? Murray's critics consider him a captive boss, the prisoner of men and forces he cannot control. To them, the real C.I.O. boss is General Counsel Lee Pressman, lawyer, shrewd publicist, a smooth man with strong left-wing tendencies. But Phil Murray's friends, paraphrasing Voltaire, say: "If there weren't a Phil Murray it would have been necessary to invent him."

He is one of the few men who could have held the C.I.O.'s obstreperous factions together, who could mollify the Communists and keep them in line. As a Catholic, he would probably like to throw the Communists out, as he has done in the Steelworkers. As a practical man, he knows that this is impossible.

With threats and pleas, he has held the C.I.O. together. When the Auto Workers were set to rescind the wartime no-strike pledge in 1944, Murray stemmed the tide with a speech delivered under heavy emotion. When occasion demands, he can be tough. When Sidney Hillman began to show signs of getting too independent with his Political Action Committee, Phil Murray cracked down with an order that P.A.C. must operate through the 39 regional C.I.O. offices, which he controls.

With war's end, Phil Murray faced a critical situation of far greater importance. With the Government committed to the policy of holding prices down, with labor in a position to force a general wage increase, with business occupying an uneasy but by no means passive spot between the two, the scene was set for what might have been a catastrophic three-cornered battle. Murray took the risk of wading in. By last week he had apparently exploited labor's advantage to the full--but he had been wise enough not to push it too far.

He had still to collect. But now his chances of collecting looked good.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.