Sweetheart Terms

Before the Senate labor-management investigating committee, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.'s top labor expert, Charles A. Schimmat, last week reluctantly told a small and ugly story. In 1952, when the C.I.O. Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union was signing up New York area supermarket employees in a successful drive for a 40-hour work week,* Schimmat cooked up a plan for keeping 16,000 clerks in 700 A. & P. stores working on the same old 45-hour week.

The plan: instead of negotiating with the aggressive C.I.O. group, he would make a deal with the A.F.L. Amalgamated

Meat Cutters Union, which had made no move to organize clerks, offer it an exclusive contract on "sweetheart" terms. In return for the right to collect dues from the captive thousands of A. & P. clerks, the butchers' union signed a 22-month contract committing the employees to work 45 hours a week. A month later, in return for some minor concessions on welfare benefits, the local boss of the butchers, Max Block, secretly agreed to extend the contract for 33 months longer, still at the old hours.

Calculating that the A. & P. saved $2,000,000 to $12 million a year during each year the contract was in effect over what its competitors were paying their help, Committee Chairman John L. McClellan last week called Schimmat's conduct "reprehensible."' Other committee Democrats, restive over being cast in the role of labor critics in McClellan investigations, vehemently agreed. Said North Carolina's Democrat Sam J. Ervin Jr.: "Those clerks were sold down the river."

* The Fair Labor Standards Act's 40-hour work week exempts retailing.

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