The Toilet Strike

In an outbreak of autumnal madness rarely equaled in the annals of industry, the biggest of U.S. manufacturers and the bellwether of U.S. unions last week hit an impasse over a topic so indelicate that neither side felt comfortable discussing it in public. The issue: toilet time.

Well before the extended deadline for the 1961 auto negotiations expired, General Motors Negotiator Louis Seaton and United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther had all but wrapped up a national economic agreement (TIME, Sept. 15). Then, just as the nation was congratulating itself on another industrial dispute peacefully solved, the trouble erupted. Choosing his words delicately, Reuther explained that all G.M. workers are entitled to 24 minutes off the assembly line each day "to take care of their personal needs." But. charged Reuther, G.M. was denying workers this inalienable right by refusing to put enough extra men on the line to allow for the bathroom breaks.

G.M. negotiators scoffed. But, taken together with a host of sticky disputes over local working conditions in G.M.'s 129 plants, toilet time produced the most needless major strike in U.S. history, early this week sent 257,000 workers walking out of 91 G.M. plants.

Broken Yo-Yo. Each of the strikes was a local affair called by a local union leader anxious to assert his authority. Like children out to embarrass their parents in public, local leaders went much further than Reuther expected, as they wrangled with G.M. plant negotiators over 11,000 issues ranging from the utterly frivolous (time off for deer hunting) to the undeniably serious (job transfer rights).

G.M. openly blamed Reuther for causing the mess with a telegram he had dispatched to the locals telling them they were free to go on strike if they had no agreement on local issues when the national deadline came. Piqued Government officials agreed that Reuther had blundered badly with his telegram, mistakenly believing that he had his members on a Yo-Yo, could call them out for a few days to put a bit of extra pressure on G.M. and then send them back.

The U.A.W. lashed back, blaming G.M. for delaying serious bargaining on local issues too long. Said a U.A.W. official: "We warned General Motors from the beginning that these disputes had to be settled, and urged them to give their plant managers autonomy in dealing with our local leaders." Ford and Chrysler negotiators, who have been marking time to see what the G.M. final settlement would be, clearly got the message and ordered their own local talks stepped up.

Empty Pipelines. For G.M. the damage had been done. Under pressure from Labor Secretary Goldberg (see cover), the toilet-time issue was quickly compromised: G.M. agreed to guarantee enough relief workers to spell each man for his 24 minutes, and Reuther dropped a demand for an extra 15 minutes relief time. By week's end, local agreements had been signed between G.M. and 72 of the striking locals.

But G.M. had already lost the production of 60.000 1962 models, and even if the rest of the strikes were settled quickly, many more production days would be lost before components plants could grind out enough parts to fill the dried-up pipelines to G.M. assembly plants. In the meantime, everybody would have plenty of time to go to the toilet.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.