Still in the Trenches

STRIKES Still in the Trenches The 26-union strike against the nation's copper producers--longest walkout in U.S. history against virtually an entire industry--last week dragged into its eighth month. Though the unions and major copper companies remain as far apart as ever, a few small cracks have appeared in the costly deadlock.

The strike-leading United Steelworkers union and a subsidiary of American Metal Climax, Inc., have agreed on a new contract for A.M.C.'s huge Carteret, N.J., smelter, source of 10% of the U.S. domestic supply of refined copper. Terms: a $1.07-an-hour increase in wages, pensions, health and welfare benefits, raising hourly pay to a range of $3.11 to $4.24. It was the second settlement in three weeks. Sixth ranking Copper Range Co., which normally extracts about 6% of the nation's annual output of copper ore from its 2,000-ft.-deep mine in White Pine, Mich., agreed in late January to an aver age wage-fringe boost of 960 an hour over the next 42 months. Last week Copper Range sharply raised the price of its copper, from a pre-strike 380 to 47.90 a Ib.

Basic Change. The two settlements actually put little new pressure on copper's Big Four--Anaconda, Kennecott, Phelps Dodge and American Smelting & Refining--to come to terms with 60,000 strikers. Both agreements involve local operations and thus do not touch the strike's key issue: the 26 unions' demand for a basic change in the bargaining rules. The unions, backed by the full power of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., demand the right to bargain as a coalition within each company, and to set common expiration dates on all contracts. "This is a strike," said A.F.L.-C.I.O. President George Meany recently, "that we cannot afford to lose." The copper producers insist that company-wide bargaining would put the industry at the mercy of the steelworkers' union.

So far the strike has shut down some 60 facilities in 23 states and heavily damaged the economies of Arizona, Montana, Nevada, Utah and New Mexico. It has also added at least $200 million to the nation's balance-of-payments deficit, as copper users have been forced to turn to foreign suppliers, who now charge 700 a Ib. Despite union strike benefits, federal food stamps and county welfare payments, the strikers are hurting too. "Financially, I'm busted," said Machinist Wilbur E. Moses of Anaconda, Mont., last week. "But there ain't much we can do about it."

One Way. About the only gainer to date from the strike is aluminum.

"We've won all our markets at the expense of entrenched materials," said an

Alcoa official last week, "but this copper thing has given us our biggest boost yet." Some air-conditioning manufacturers, for example, are redesigning condensers and evaporating tubing for aluminum; Detroit's Michigan Utilities Co. has begun converting to aluminum tubing for connections to gas appliances. A good deal of the switching is impelled not by copper shortages but by the rising price of the metal. And however the strike ends, the price seems sure to go only one way: up.

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