The Golden Harvest

The first of the golden apples began plopping down on U.S. labor a few weeks after Korea. Startled union leaders, who thought they had stripped the branches clean with wage, pension and insurance demands just last spring, looked up to discover the Korean mobilization had produced a whole new crop of juicy wage increases.

By last week unions were running with ladders, hooks, pruning shears and bushel baskets to get the pickings. In most cases just a little shaking of the tree did the work. All the big automakers raced to rip up their old contracts and raise wages. Some 750,000 of its members, said the C.I.O.'s United Auto Workers last week, have fattened their pay envelopes by wage hikes of about 10-c- an hour.

One-Way Escalator. The autoworkers were not the only ones. Burlington Mills upended the textile industry (and took the starch out of a union-organizing drive) by voluntarily adding 8-c- an hour to pay envelopes in 75 plants through the South and East. General Electric settled its siege with the C.I.O.'s International Union of Electrical Workers (see cut) for a 10-c- raise and a cost-of-living clause riding on a one-way escalator: if living costs went up, so would pay, but if costs went down, wages would stay up. I.U.E.'s archrival, the Communist-line United Electrical Workers, spurned the G.E. escalator but got a promise for new wage negotiations within six months.

Even the thoughtful, business-minded International Ladies' Garment Workers and their C.I.O. running mates, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, hustled to get in line. Both I.L.G.W.U. and Amalgamated had long delayed their wage demands because their employers were running into bad times. But now that business was booming again, both intended to get an increase of 15%. The C.I.O. United Rubber Workers beat the drums for 31-c-, probably would settle for about 25-c-, while the East Coast longshoremen set out to get another 37-c- an hour for their 30,000 members. In addition, countless individual craft and trade unionists, e.g., the A.F.L.'s 900,000 construction workers, were quietly pushing up their demands.

Two-Way Squeeze. It was a harvest almost without precedent in the history of U.S. collective bargaining. Even in the comparable days of 1941, when the U.S. was mobilizing for Lend-Lease, labor unions had to fight every inch of the way for their raises. But this time, with skilled workmen hard to find and mobilization sure to squeeze the labor market tighter, U.S. employers were determined to hang on to their workers by upping their wages. Besides, both labor and management knew Harry Truman had the power to freeze wages any day, and neither wanted to be frozen below the prevailing level.

There was only one worm in the golden apple. Because the wage boosts would bring certain price increases, the cost of living would spurt upwards again and so would the cost of U.S. defense and the taxes to pay for it.

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