Third Try

For the third time, the steel strike was postponed. At President Truman's urgent request, United Steelworkers' President Philip Murray agreed to a six-day extension of the strike deadline. Then, for the first time since July, the steel companies sat down with labor negotiators for a last try at company-by-company bargaining.

All of the palaver was beginning to make some of the steelworkers a little restive. At one U.S. steel subsidiary and two small independent plants, 5,300 workers walked out on wildcat strikes. Explained one local unionist: "We've built the boys up and they're ready to go. You just can't keep putting the cork back in the bottle." Philip Murray admitted there was "widespread restlessness," and added flatly: "This is the last postponement."

Washington strategists were optimistic. "We had to get them out of Washington," explained a Labor Department conciliator. "Murray was too far out on the limb to crawl back and the steel companies were fast getting into the same position on the opposite limb. Local bargaining may turn up something that can be made to fit the entire industry."

Once the bargaining got underway, something turned up almost at once. Standard Steel Works, a subsidiary of the Baldwin Locomotive Works, promptly agreed to the full 10-c--an-hour pension and welfare package urged by the President as a sound basis for settling the contract dispute in the steel industry (TIME, Sept. 26). But other companies, as usual, would probably wait to see what U.S. Steel decided before they budged.

As the talks wore on, with the Big Steel negotiators still at loggerheads, the biggest hope for a break appeared this week in an unexpected quarter. In Detroit, the Ford Motor Co. announced that it had offered the auto workers' Walter Reuther a company-paid pension plan in line with the recommendations of the steel board. Ford cautiously reported real progress, and Henry Ford II made plans to leave this week for Europe despite Reuther's peremptory announcement that he was issuing a strike notice, effective Sept. 29. If autos settled, there was still a good chance that steel would fall peacefully into line.

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