Tough on Shippers

The Atlantic and Gulf Coast dock strike was one of the longest and costliest in U.S. maritime history. It left 100,000 workers idle, including 62,000 striking longshoremen, cost $700 million and created dislocations, small or large, in almost every industry in the nation. Last week, after 33 days, the strike ended--but the settlement caused almost as much commotion and concern as the strike itself.

"Take It or Leave It." What disturbed the shippers, and some other businessmen too, was the heavy hand of Government in the final settlement. They fear that the settlement may form a pattern for several other major contract negotiations coming up later. Intervening in strikes, and often with success, has been the practice of the Kennedy Administration, which obviously felt a duty to try to settle a prolonged strike that threatened large areas of the economy.

In the past, though, the Administration's role has largely been that of friendly mediator, suggesting solutions and helping two dissident parties inch toward compromise. This time was different. Neither a Taft-Hartley injunction nor a platoon of regular federal mediators did any good. So Kennedy named a three-man mediation board, headed by labor-leaning Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, and threatened the strikers and shippers with congressional intervention if they did not go along with the final terms of the board. It was practically compulsory arbitration. As Senator Morse put it: "Take it or leave it."

Stiff Settlement. The board's final terms tempted many shippers to leave it, and the key word in their acceptance was "reluctance." Not only was the settlement stiff; it was more than double the figure prescribed under the Administration's price-wage "guidelines" that set the tone for last year's noninflationary settlements in the steel and aluminum industries. Under these guideposts, any industry's wages and fringe benefits should rise only as fast as industry's overall productivity.

In the dock industry, where the longshoremen's prestrike hourly base of $3.02 (plus fringe benefits) put their wages in the top 8% of U.S. hourly workers, the new settlement called for a 39-c--an-hour package increase over the next two years --17-c- more than management offered, 11-c- less than labor asked. This is roughly a 5% to 6% increase a year, while industry's productivity is increasing only 2% to 3% yearly and longshoreman productivity is actually declining. Meanwhile, the agreement did nothing about the featherbedding "work gang rules" that management claims are holding productivity down. This question was left to what promises to be a nearly endless series of study groups. Even with that victory, several locals dawdled about going back to work until word came from the Administration that President Kennedy was "fed up" with their recalcitrance. At week's end the International Longshoremen's Association ordered them to return to the docks.

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