Truce by Telephone

President Phil Murray of the C.I.O. Steelworkers climbed aboard an overnight train in Washington one evening last week, heading back to Pittsburgh and still grimly bent on a strike that would shut down U.S. steel production for at least a week. Just after the train pulled out, a White House telephone operator tried to get him at C.I.O. headquarters in the capital. The call finally reached Murray when he got to his Pittsburgh office next morning. Harry Truman and Phil Murray talked for several minutes. After they hung up, Murray consulted his policy committee and dispatched a terse telegram to his locals: "Stay on the job."

Phil Murray's abrupt about-face came just in time to stop the Steelworkers from shutting down the furnaces in anticipation of a New Year's Eve walkout. The President broke into an impromptu press conference to pass the news along to the nation. "I am happy there will be no steel strike on Jan. 1," he said, "and I am hopeful there will be no strike at all."

But Murray's decision brought only a postponement of the deadlock over steel, not a solution. The Steelworkers' demands for increased wages and benefits (variously estimated at from 30-c- to 50-c- an hour) will go next week before the Wage Stabilization Board. There it will be up to Economic Stabilizer Roger Putnam to find the final answer to a three-horned poser: 1) Phil Murray's determination to get more of an increase than present wage stabilization policies allow; 2) Big Steel's determination to yield nothing to labor without a steel price increase; and 3) the obvious fact that a break in the wage & price line for steel will set off a string of inflationary explosions all through the U.S. economy.

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