Toward Negotiation

Outside four olive-drab sheds, which will ultimately house army latrines, 1,100 Vietnamese construction workers at Phan Rang last week excitedly queued up to cast what were, for almost all of them, their first ballots. When the free, secret election was over, they had chosen a ten-person "workers' council" to deal with their employer, the U.S. construction combine, which is led by Morrison-Knudsen of Boise, Idaho, and known as RMK-BRJ.* Far from fighting the unionization, the combine sponsored it as one way to ease around a barrier it had not bargained for: labor unrest.

Politics & Pay. Since 750 workers first walked off a Saigon project in mid-April, RMK-BRJ has been hit with strikes at ten of its 72 big building sites from Can Tho to Danang. At one time or another, about 12,000 of its 40,000 Vietnamese workers have put down their tools, often with reasonable gripes about wages and working conditions. Lately, though, the Viet Cong have been moving in. In Saigon last month, suspected V.C. agitators puffed a minor dispute into a walkout of 1,600 workers, virtually halted work on vital port facilities for nine days.

The problems are mostly about pay, not politics. "The wage rate," says one RMK-BRJ official, "is the most explosive issue facing this outfit." Surprisingly, the combine wants to pay more but cannot. The wage lid is being held down tight by both the U.S. embassy and the Vietnamese government, not only to frustrate inflation but also to keep the U.S. combine from hiring sorely needed skilled workers away from Vietnamese employers, who pay up to 23% more. Under their U.S. Government cost-plus fixed-fee contracts, RMK-BRJ's wage scales are pegged at 1957 levels; machinists start at 20-c- an hour, laborers 8-c-. Since the cost of living has zoomed 64% in the past 15 months, the glow of the U.S. paycheck has dimmed.

Profits & Polls. The resulting strikes have helped put construction behind its scheduled $40 million-a-month pace and have cut the combine's profits. Under its contract, RMK-BRJ earns between 1.7% and 3% on the cost of its projects (total so far: $770 million), depending on the speed of work. That is well below the 6% average in overseas construction.

The labor problem grows as fast as RMK-BRJ. Already the country's second largest employer, next to the Vietnamese government, the combine hopes to boost its force by 50%, to 60,000 workers by this fall, as projects pass the $1 billion mark. Though not a great deal can be done immediately about wages, the workers' councils can accomplish much to ease misunderstandings between the Vietnamese and their harddriving, highly motivated U.S. foremen, and settle other squabbles. RMK-BRJ hopes to have elections as soon as possible at its dozen biggest sites.

* For Raymond International of Manhattan, Morrison-Knudsen, Brown & Root of Houston, and J. A. Jones of Charlotte, N.C.

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