Beck's Bad Boys

One of the most stubborn strikes in a city with a long history of labor unrest entered its fourth month. Eying each other across a widening void were the managements of five of Pittsburgh's biggest department stores and 1,700 members of two A.F.L. Teamsters Union locals.

The Teamsters in the picket lines had done well at the department stores involved--Kaufmann's, Home's, Gimbels, Frank & Seder's and Rosenbaum's. Their pay, $2.122 an hour, was at or near the Teamsters' national top, and they enjoyed two featherbedding privileges unmatched in. the U.S. The stores were not permitted to make parcel-post deliveries, but were required to put a union driver and helper on every delivery truck, regardless of the size of the load.

Broken Windows. This helped to drive delivery costs in Pittsburgh to stratospheric levels. One of the stores reported that costs were running 4.6% of sales as against .6 of 1% at comparable Boston stores, and an 18-city average of 1.5%.

When negotiations with the union began last fall, the stores not only balked at wage increases but insisted that the driver-helper and parcel-post featherbedding clauses be modified. After the strike began on Dec. i, Dave Beck, the Teamsters' international boss, asked both sides to arbitrate. Management's answer was that its right to use the Government mails was hardly a subject for arbitration. The local union also rejected Beck's plea and the strike broke out in violence. Store windows were smashed, paint and gasoline bombs thrown against cars of customers and nonstrikers.

In the long weeks since, neither the strikers nor the stores have suffered so much as the other had hoped. A Pittsburgh A.F.L. delegation persuaded the Agriculture Department to make surplus Government food available to the strikers, whose only income was $20 a week each from other local unions. Teamsters soon boasted that not only were they helping feed strikers' families, but 6,000 other A.F.L. members in the Pittsburgh area as well.

The stores, surrounded by picket lines just as the Christmas rush began, had factories and wholesalers ship directly to retail customers. They began using parcel post, also gave shoppers photographs of merchandise too bulky to send through the mail, and a promise of delivery as quickly as possible. An appeal by the A.F.L. to wives of union members to cancel their charge accounts fell flat.

Glimmer of Hope. Sales at the picketed establishments are off an estimated 30%, but profits have not dropped proportionately because high delivery costs have been all but eliminated. (The Home Co. reported a record net in 1953.)

This week some Pittsburghers thought they detected a glimmer of hope. It looked as if Dave Beck himself might intercede. Beck, who prides himself on running his union like a big business (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), did not sanction the Pittsburgh walkout and has refused benefits to the strikers. Officially, he said only that he would move in "at the right time," and colleagues said the dispute was not the kind of strike Beck thought served the cause of labor. Said Teamster Beck: "I refused to sanction the strike before it started, and I don't condone it any more now than I did then."

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