Storm at Sea

"This," said Captain William V. Bradley, president of the International Longshoremen's Association, "is the most confused strike I ever heard of. And I have led some strange strikes myself."

The first major U.S. maritime walkout in six years was strange indeed. It tied up 222 ships on all three coasts, threatened fuel shortages in the East and food shortages in Hawaii, and left frustrated federal mediators awash in a sea of conflicting charges and demands. Ranged on one side of the dispute were the owners of 850 of the nation's 941 merchant ships, negotiating in three separate groups--East Coast, Gulf Coast and West Coast. On the other stood 50,000 working seamen and 30,000 unemployed seamen, represented by two big unions and three smaller ones. The Big Two:

P: The 37,000-man National Maritime Union, bossed by tough Joe Curran, 55, who looks like a foghorn sounds. Curran's N.M.U. is strongest among seamen on East Coast general cargo and passenger ships.

P: The 18,000-man Seafarers International Union, headed by freighter-sized (220 lbs.) Paul Hall. The S.I.U. centers its power on Atlantic and Gulf Coast tankers and other bulk cargo ships.

Wages Up, Jobs Down. For years, Curran and Hall have waged a Pier 6 brawl with each other for dominance of seagoing labor. Hoping to forge ahead of Hall, Joe Curran this year demanded a 30-hour work week, a 12% package wage increase over four years, and assorted fringes. Hall, not to be outdone, asked management for something much more controversial--the right to bargain for more than 20,000 foreign sailors who man U.S.-owned ships registered abroad. (Curran made the same demand, but passed word that he would drydock it for sweeter wages and hours.)

Most of the owners refused even to negotiate the issue of foreign-flag ships. For U.S. shipowners the overriding economic fact of life is that the U.S. able seaman earns wages and overtime averaging $612 a month--three to four times as much as a foreign sailor. Largely because of this wage gulf, the number of U.S.-flag private merchant ships has slipped from 1,050 to 941 in the past decade. Meantime, U.S. owners have registered 454 ships in foreign countries, including 259 in tax-free Panama, Liberia and Honduras. Not only can these "flag of convenience" ships be operated at half the cost of a U.S.-flag ship, but the 259 "Pan-Lib-Hon" vessels are under U.S. "effective control," i.e., Washington can order them into the U.S. merchant fleet in time of war.'

U.S. unions would like to have the foreign-flag ships sail under U.S. wage scales and, ultimately, with U.S. crews. That, cries management, would mean economic and political disaster. To put the crews under U.S. labor controls might incite foreign protests, and would certainly make the ships noncompetitive. If that happens, the companies say, Washington would have to subsidize them by at least $500 million yearly or they would be forced to mothball or sell the ships. The long-term result, the ship owners argue, could only be that more of the world's ships and shipping business would pass into foreign hands, leaving the U.S. with out even a flag-of-convenience merchant fleet to use in case of war. The unions retort that such ships might well be of little value in an emergency because some of the crewmen are "unqualified," and their loyalty to the U.S. is questionable.

Enter Goldberg. With negotiations at a dead stall, Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg sailed in with basically the same idea that he had used to settle two other transportation strikes this year: let both sides "voluntarily" resume work for 60 days while a three-man presidential fact-finding panel sieves the issues and submits nonbinding recommendations. Plainly this was an attempt by former Union Lawyer Goldberg to avoid taking an alternative route that he dislikes--a Taft-Hartley law injunction that would oblige the seamen to return to work for 80 days.

Management promptly accepted the Goldberg proposal. But the unions surprisingly turned it down. Joe Curran said that a voluntary 60-day return to work would probably be followed by a Taft-Hartley injunction anyhow; that would confront the unions with the chilling prospect of hitting the bricks again around Christmas. At week's end President Kennedy ordered a study to determine whether the strike was doing enough economic damage to warrant a resort to Taft-Hartley. Whatever happened, everyone concerned knew that the issue of foreign flags and the rivalry between two tough union skippers would plague U.S. waterfronts for a long time to come.

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