Indignity & Peril

The air was crisp with excitement and expectancy in the crowded Washington hearing room this week when the fact-finding panel appointed by President Eisenhower started its last-chance hearings in an effort to help get the steel strike settled. When the session ended 4 1/2 hours later, Chairman George William Taylor was still showing the unflagging amiability and hopefulness of the professional mediator, but the excitement and expectancy in the audience had soured into disgust at both sides. The fact finders had clearly silhouetted one big fact that the U.S. was discovering on its own: in the 14-week wrangling of the U.S's longest nationwide steel shutdown two immovable forces--Big Steel and the big United Steelworkers--had subjected the nation to an indignity and peril that far exceeded the worth of the points at issue.

This week, after getting the fact finders' gloomy report, the President ordered the Justice Department to seek a Taft-Hartley injunction to get the steelworkers back to the mills for the prescribed 80 days.

With bottomless patience the Taylor panel had been trying all week to cut through the murk of charges and counter-charges and down to the core facts of the strike. But they got little help from either Steelworker President Dave McDonald or Steel Industry Negotiator R. Conrad Cooper. With nearly 90% of the nation's steelmaking capacity idled since mid-July, with layoffs spreading rapidly through the economy as manufacturers shut down for lack of steel (see BUSINESS), McDonald kept spouting purple rhetoric, Cooper kept spouting dun-grey generalities. Said Chairman Taylor at one of the sessions: "It's very distressing at this stage that we are still having trouble defining issues."

Bungled Campaign. At the start of the strike, the big steel companies, led by U.S. Steel Chairman Roger Blough, laid down a demand of their own: in return for even a modest boost in wages and fringe benefits, the union would have to agree to contract changes to "cut the cost of steelmaking." With high labor costs squeezing U.S. steel out of foreign markets (TIME, July 20), the steel companies had a solid argument for holding costs down. Revelations of corruption in the labor movement had weakened organized labor's influence. And the U.S. public was fed up with price upcreep.

But the steel companies bungled their campaign. First they asked too much: a sweeping grant of authority to change plant work rules in the name of "efficiency and economy." Then they failed to justify the demand. Company spokesmen charged that the work rules foster "featherbedding and loafing," but never supplied a solid example to document the charge or a solid specific on how the authority to change the rules would be used. When Mediator Taylor asked Bethlehem Steel Negotiator John Morse to explain just how the work rules created problems in particular mills, Morse replied that he was "afraid the panel would get bogged down in details." Retorted Taylor: "Well, we're sure getting bogged down in generalities."

Doubtful Package. At midweek, Mediator Taylor hopefully asked for and got President Eisenhower's permission to delay the fact-finding panel's report a few days to give the two sides more time to work out a settlement.

The evening before their report to the President was due, Taylor and his fellow mediators were still trying to find a kernel of agreement that might serve as the starting point for a last-minute solution. McDonald trimmed his demands for a two-year wage and benefits increase of 28 1/2-c- down to a 19 3/4-c- package--the level at which California's Edgar Kaiser had urged his fellow steel men to settle. Industry's Cooper stonily told the fact finders that McDonald's package would really cost 33-c-, and the proposal was "unacceptable"; in its place he stood on a threeyear, 30-c- package (which the steelworkers said was worth only 14 1/2 over the next two years) and put forward an industry proposal to submit the demand for work-rule changes to binding arbitration. McDonald called this proposal "phony." There was still no bargaining, no "give."

Said Labor Secretary James Mitchell as deadline loomed: "I want to urge upon the parties the fact that 1 temporary resumption of production under a Taft-Hartley injunction and a postponement of permanent settlement will solve nothing ... I would hope that, in view of the grave results that are liable to follow their continued inability to reach a permanent settlement, this final plea will make them mindful of their responsibility to their fellow citizens."

From neither side came an answer. The bodies sat at the table--and sat.

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