Labor's Disturbing Challenge

THE speaker on the dais of Bal Harbour's Americana Hotel last week was nervous, and he showed it in a shaky voice and several misplaced words. Richard Nixon had good reason to feel a bit of stage fright, since the rostrum from which he spoke faced some 2,000 delegates to the AFL-CIO convention, which had just adopted a resolution severely critical of his new economic plan. In a speech that excoriated Nixon's basic sense of economic justice, AFL-CIO President George Meany had gloweringly shouted that "if the President of the United States doesn't want our membership on the Pay Board on our terms, he knows what he can do!" Nixon thereupon made the unexpected move of asking to reply in person. "I know exactly what I can do, and I am going to do it," he said. "We want the participation of all ... areas of the society. But whether we get that participation or not, it is my obligation as President to make this program of stopping the rise in cost of living succeed."

AFL-CIO delegates showed their hostility to Nixon in other ways than the resolution. They accorded him one of the most discourteous welcomes in the recent annals of presidential ceremony. The band was ordered not to strike up Hail to the Chief, the President's customary entry flourish, and Meany introduced the President with a few perfunctory words. Nixon went out of his way to appear conciliatory by recalling the hardhat marches of 18 months ago. "When the intellectuals were protesting, 150,000 workers marched down Wall Street to support me," he said. "I want you to know that I appreciate that." But after ending his remarks with a plea for labor support, Nixon received little applause. Then, to the audience's delight, Meany quipped: "We will now proceed with Act II." Nixon, for his part, cancelled plans to spend the week end at his Key Biscayne home, and returned to Washington.

In fact, having gained most of what they sought during Act I of Nixon's economic program, labor's leaders are clearly a good deal less angry at the President than they claim to be. But just as union negotiators must make villains of management--even after they get a settlement satisfactory to their members--so Meany & Co. must keep up the fiction of fighting Phase II. In his keynote address, the 77-year-old AFL-CIO boss put on a sometimes tasteless show of personal invective. The 15-member Pay Board, he claimed, is a "stacked deck" against labor, and its president, retired Federal Judge George Boldt, "doesn't know a damn thing."

Meany called the leader of the business representatives, General Electric Co. Vice President Virgil Day, "a pipsqueak." He also charged that labor members of the board were offered an "under-the-table deal" that would have permitted big unions to gain pay boosts above the board's 5.5% guideline if smaller unions were pressured into accepting the official goal. Actually, it is far more likely that the big-union contracts were merely used as examples during board discussions.

Runaway Vehicle. Meany's main point in the speech was to announce that labor's Pay Board members will adopt a policy of noncooperation, under which they will refuse to vote on resolutions that they consider unfair. They also will boycott some sessions of the board and urge unions to take "lawful" action against decisions that are not to members' liking. Since Meany's past policy could hardly be called one of cooperation, the new one should make little practical difference.

What is disturbing is not so much labor's rhetoric as its increasingly clear policy of noncooperation with the over all goal of Nixon's program: the slowdown of the wage-price spiral. The late freeze did bring some gains against inflation; the consumer price index rose a mere .1% in October, its smallest increase since early 1967. But prices will shoot up again if wage contracts continue to call for annual increases of 10% and more, and the price boosts will quickly wipe out pay gains. So far, though, union leaders have refused to apply the brakes to their side of inflation's runaway vehicle. To help set the proper example, Meany engineered convention approval of a 28% increase (to $90,000 annually) in his own salary --five times as high as the Phase II guideline for pay boosts.

Another Loop. The nation's 80,000 coal miners fared nearly as well last week --and with Pay Board approval at that. By a vote of 10 to 3, the board decided that a coal contract calling for increases in wages and benefits of at least 15% in the first year was not "unreasonably inconsistent" with its 5.5% guideline. Members made that decision in spite of the fact that the contract's welfare package was higher than even union negotiators had first expected. It was the board's first major wage decision, and the surprise in the inflationary giveaway was the peace-at-any-price vote of business representatives. Evidently convinced by mine owners that the contract was their only hope of settling the six-week coal strike, all five joined with the labor members in approving it. Public members wanted to chop the increase to 12.5%, and three voted against the 15% rise; the others abstained. The ones who voted expressed an understated doubt that inflation will decline "if increases of this magnitude are permitted."

Mine owners will undoubtedly petition the Price Commission to let them pass on the expense of the contract to customers. Commission Chairman C. Jackson Grayson promised to examine the owners' additional costs "very closely," but coal users are almost certainly in for a hefty jump in the fuel's price--and the nation for one more loop in the wage-price spiral. The fact that it will be due largely to the cave-in of the Pay Board's business members, who are usually regarded as presidential allies, presents Nixon with a challenge almost as troubling as Meany's.

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