New Model

As casually as a salesman flipping open the door of a new model, the Chrysler Corp. made auto industry history last week: it offered a $25 million-a-year (10-c--15-c--an-hour) cost-of-living wage increase to 120,000 workers, despite its three-year contract with the U.A.W.-C.I.O. which freezes wages until July 1, 1951. (The increase had not come without prodding by the union; wildcat strikers, disgruntled over the rise in the cost of living, had thrown 13,000 out of work.) In the fast tightening labor market, Chrysler's new pay scale will help the company in bidding for new workers, since its average hourly wage will be above Ford's and almost even with General Motors'.-

To help write the new wage agreement, 45-year-old Chrysler Vice President Lester Colbert sat in on negotiations, the first top production executive to do so in more than a decade. To automen, this was almost as significant as the pay boost.

Dark-haired, brown-eyed "Tex" Colbert, who was born in Oakwood, Texas and graduated from Harvard Law School, has been something like a boy wonder at Chrysler. A big, broad-shouldered, hail-fellow-well-met with a razor-sharp mind, Tex Colbert went to Detroit in 1933 from Manhattan's Rathbone, Perry, Kelley & Drye, Chrysler attorneys, and stayed there as resident attorney. In 1943, he got his first crack at production problems when Chrysler sent him to Chicago to unsnarl red tape entangling the Dodge aircraft engine plant, world's biggest. He did such a good job that he was made plant manager, turned out 18,413 of the motors that powered the B-29s.

After war's end, he was made president of the Dodge division, has had a finger in more & more corporate pies and a habit of working at high-compression speed. If Chrysler President K. T. Keller, who will be 65 this fall, should decide to retire, it looked as if Tex Colbert would be among the leading candidates to succeed him.

*G.M. last week granted a 5-c--an-hour increase in line with the cost-of-living clause in its contract. Packard's two-week strike ended this week with a 4-c--an-hour raise, $125-a-month pensions, and a cost-of-living clause and annual technological raise similar to G.M.'s.

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