The Third Party

In three U.S. industries last week the Government and the courts were an omnipresent third party in the process of "free collective bargaining." Items:

> In a third-floor room in Chicago's Union Station, representatives of the nation's major railroads and their 500,000 non-operating employees (clerks, telegraphers, etc.) nailed down final agreement on a 12-c--an-hour boost in wages and fringes --the package recommended by a presidential emergency board. Railroad negotiators argued bitterly against the 4.86% increase, pointing out that it was far larger than the 2 1/2% wage raise that the Kennedy Administration has declared the proper noninflationary medicine for most industries. But the railroads had little choice; their strike insurance policies do not pay off if they disregard the findings of an emergency board. Besides, reported one railroad representative, Labor Secretary Arthur Goldberg "advised us that we had no alternative but to accept."

>For the seventh time in a year, the Flight Engineers' International Association threatened to strike three major airlines: Trans World, Pan American and Eastern. The engineers' quarrel was not basically with the companies at all. They were fighting for the survival of their union in defiance of a National Mediation Board's ruling that would oblige the engineer in every jet crew to be a trained pilot, and would in time sweep the engineers into the powerful Air Line Pilots Association. FAA Administrator Najeeb Halaby has warned the engineers that if they strike, he intends to keep the big jets flying--even if he has to seek congressional action to do so.

>Reviving one of the oldest and most violent disputes in U.S. labor history, the Supreme Court upheld a National Labor Relations Board's ruling that Wisconsin's Kohler Co. was guilty of unfair labor practices during the six-year strike that the U.A.W. launched against Kohler in 1954. On the face of it, the decision obliges the Sheboygan plumbing fixtures firm, which has been operating with strikebreakers since the dispute was two months old, to reopen negotiations with the U.A.W. and to rehire virtually all of the 2,800 original strikers. Actually Kohler has already offered reinstatement to the strikers, and only 500 accepted.

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