Opening the Ports

Union men have long lamented that 70-year-old Harry Bridges, once an especially hot labor firebrand, has mellowed with the years. Such talk will probably not be heard much after this week when, as Bridges expects, his 15,000 West Coast longshoremen at 24 ports vote to accept a 34% raise and end the nation's longest dock strike.

Bridges probably would have kept the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union out even longer had the 18-week dispute not brought the Nixon Administration and Congress to the brink of tough antistrike legislation. Last fall Nixon invoked the Taft-Hartley Act's 80-day cooling-off period to suspend the West Coast dock walkout. When it expired on Christmas Day and the strike resumed last month, the President revived a proposal sent to Congress last year and menacingly renamed it "The Crippling Strikes Prevention Act." A key provision would have enabled the President to name a panel of arbitrators that could impose the last "reasonable" offer made by either employers or union as a final settlement. That might have resulted in unions being forced to accept the employer terms against which they had struck. One version of that measure failed to pass the Senate last week by a surprisingly thin margin of only three votes. A rewritten bill, providing compulsory arbitration of the West Coast dock strike only, reached Nixon's desk last week--a day after Bridges and the 122-company Pacific Maritime Association announced an agreement.

Catching Up? The 18-month contract provides for $2.51 an hour in higher wages and fringe benefits, including dental care, paid prescription drugs, overtime pay for working more than six hours a day and 36 hours of guaranteed pay a week--even if there is no work to do. In all, a West Coast docker could be making an extra $100 a week in wages and fringes by the end of the contract.

Once the pact is ratified by union members, it will face one more hurdle: the Pay Board. The agreement's average yearly increment of 23% is four times the board's 5.5% guideline. Union and company bargainers are hopeful, however, that the board will consider the package a "catchup" settlement and allow it to stand. Bridges' men have not negotiated a raise since 1966.

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