What's There to Celebrate?

It was 2:15 in the morning of the 100th day when the name-calling and table-pounding died away in Detroit's Sheraton Hotel. It should have been a time for rejoicing, for Walter Reuther's C.I.O. United Automobile Workers and the Chrysler Corp. had finally settled the second longest and the second costliest strike in the U.S. automotive industry.* But everyone was still too mad to cheer.

No Posing. Hollow-eyed and weary from weeks of bickering, the U.A.W. and Chrysler negotiators pointedly avoided the amenities which usually accompany the end of a labor-management battle. They held separate press conferences to announce the outcome. When photographers pressed Walter Reuther and his aides to pose with Chrysler officials, he angrily dismissed them: "The attitude of the corporation . . . has sunk to a new low. We would not dignify the company by posing with them."

The U.A.W. had won the benefits it was seeking -- $100-a-month pensions (including social security) for workers over 65, improved medical and hospital insurance. Reuther claimed that the union had won the 10-c--an-hour in benefits that it sought (it had already won 10-c- from Ford, hopes to win a better deal from G.M.), but one expert guessed that the same welfare program which costs Ford 10-c- will cost Chrysler, because of its younger labor force, only six or seven cents. Anyway, said Reuther, Chrysler workers had won a victory in "a great human crusade to build a better tomorrow." The strike, countered Chrysler Vice President Herman L. Weckler, was not a victory for anybody. "As regards . . . [the] benefits that the individual employee gets under the new contract," he said, "he could have got substantially these at the conference table without losing a single day's pay."

There was something in what Weckler said, but the $100-a-month pension that the U.A.W. had finally won was an improvement over earlier Chrysler offers, was set up on an actuarially sound basis, instead of depending only on a Chrysler promise to pay.

The Price. The "victory" cost each of Chrysler's 89,000 workers more than three months of hardship and an average of $1,038 in lost wages. It cost about 50,000 workers in Chrysler supplier plants nearly $12 million in paychecks, although they were not on strike, and it deprived Chrysler and its dealers of 518,000 new cars and trucks worth more than $1 billion. It cost Reuther, normally one of the adroitest of negotiators and ablest of labor leaders, considerable prestige; there was strong dissatisfaction in his own ranks because of his arbitrary handling of the strike. Chrysler, the toughest major opponent the union faces, had practically refused to bargain whenever Reuther himself was in the room.

And so, in a sullen armistice, ended the strike. Somebody asked Chrysler Worker Frank Lubinski if he was going to celebrate. "What would we celebrate with?" asked Frank. "A glass of water? No, I don't think we have too much to celebrate."

*The longest: the 1945-46 General Motors strike, which lasted 113 days, cost an estimated $1,500,000,000.

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