Pride & Prejudice

The great steel mills lay cool and dead and some 500,000 steelworkers hit the streets. Another 500,000 would be called out of steel-fabricating plants the minute Philip Murray thought the right strategic moment had come. In a slower, creeping fashion--if the shutdown lengthened--unemployment would spread to railroads, auto plants, thousands of steel-dependent factories. In the wink of an eye last week, the nation's economic backbone was paralyzed by the first industry-wide steel strike since the walkout of 1946.

Federal Mediator Cyrus Ching, reflecting over his failure to break the deadlock, sadly summed up: "It's a matter of principle with both sides." Undoubtedly it was. But the people of the U.S. would have a hard time understanding just what the principle was.

Depressing Aspect. The principle, as U.S. Steel's Ben Fairless saw it, was that U.S. workers should contribute something to their own security and welfare. In the end he had accepted the presidential fact-finding board's recommendations to this extent: he had offered a 10-c--an-hour welfare package to the steelworkers' union.

But there was a condition: the workers must kick in an additional few cents on their own account.

As Murray saw it, workers should not have to put up a red cent. He argued that anything they were forced to put up for their welfare would represent a deduction from their take-home pay.

The depressing aspect of the dispute was that it could have been settled overnight with no apparent injury to either side. It would cost Ben Fairless nothing more to waive his condition of worker contributions. Fairless pointed out that it would cost most of the workers nothing more in the long run to kick in a few cents; many of them were already contributing to pension and insurance funds. Pension money would belong to them as surely as if they had put it in a savings bank.

The Motives of Two Men. Was there a valid principle at stake between Fairless' theory of contributory pensions and Murray's theory of pensions financed entirely by industry? The majority of pension plans in U.S. industry were noncontributory. But there was also plenty of precedent in the U.S. (including Social Security) for the other theory. On other fronts last week industries were busy making bargains based on both propositions (see below) as pragmatic matters of business rather than as items of far-reaching sociological or economic import.

Actually the Murray-Fairless fight appeared to be less a matter of principle than one of various prides & prejudices. Fairless objected to Government fact-finding boards; moreover, he was outraged by Murray's settle-or-I-shoot tactics. Murray had sounded his war cry so furiously that now he could not retreat an inch. Nor did Murray want to face the slightest possibility of another labor leader (i.e., John Lewis or Walter Reuther) getting a better settlement than he could.

To a degree, the two men had been swept into their intransigent positions by the very nature of their commanding positions--Fairless as head of the company that would set the pattern for the steel industry, Murray as head of the big union that was to set the fourth-round pattern for Big Labor. Whatever the background of the dispute, whatever strategies were involved, Murray and Fairless had let the situation get beyond control.

"The President Is Through." At week's end there was no sign of an early settlement. Murray in a new gesture of defiance jacked up his demands to the old level; now he would take nothing less than the demands he had made before the fact finders' compromise: a straight 12-c--an-hour wage hike, 6.27-c- for insurance, 11.23-c- for pensions--a total of 30-c-.

The President could have invoked the Taft-Hartley law to keep the plants open another 80 days, but Harry Truman had no use for Taft-Hartley, even if it was the law of the land. He had already managed to have the strike postponed 77 days with nothing but unhappy results. The word from the White House was: "The President is through. From now on they are on their own."

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