Four Years & Stubbornness Have Torn a Town

This week in Washington, Labor Leader Walter Reuther would tell his side of the long-drawn-out Kohler strike to a Senate investigating committee that was hotly divided in its attitude toward the fiery United Auto Workers leader. Democrats would try to protect Democrat Reuther; Republicans were hoping to provoke him into left-wing excesses. Reason: the four-year-old Kohler strike is the nation's major labor-management battleground.

FOR its size (pop. 45,000), the Wisconsin city of She-boygan--"the greatest little town in the world"--may well be the most hate-ridden community in the U.S. Passing on the street, men who used to be coworkers, neighbors and friends now glare at each other in deep-frozen enmity. At night, normally law-abiding citizens vent their gnawing hatred against their enemies in acts of vandalism: slashing automobile tires, scattering nails in driveways, hurling glass jars filled with paint through house windows. Sheboygan's hate reaches even to the children: an everyday sight is a tight-lipped child followed by other children shrilly jeering, ''Your father's a dirty scab!"

Sheboygan's blighting hatred traces back to April 5, 1954. On that day, United Auto Workers Local 833 went out on strike against Kohler Co., the U.S.'s No. 2 manufacturer of plumbing fixtures, and Sheboygan's No. i employer. That strike is still dragging on, with no end in sight. It is already one of the longest strikes in U.S. history, and it is probably the costliest, whether measured in dollars or human misery.

Bread & Roses

It is ironic that Kohler Co. became an antagonist in the U.S.'s ugliest strike. President Herbert V. Kohler, 66, whose Austrian-born father founded the firm in 1873, considers himself a just and benevolent employer. The Kohlers dreamed the noble but now old-fashioned dream of providing both "bread and roses" for their workers. To house Kohler employees, the company built on the outskirts of Sheboygan a 500-house garden city, with its own schools and recreation facilities. With its handsome, well-built red brick houses and patches of landscaped greenery, this monument to paternalism, incorporated as the Village of Kohler, may rank as the world's most attractive company town.

But along with Herbert Kohler's paternalism went a steely sternness and a pride that bristled when his employees heeded outside labor organizers. When Kohler workers who had joined an A.F.L. union struck for recognition in 1934, Kohler hired 400 guards, set out to break the strike. On July 27, 1934, guards fired into a crowd outside the main gate, killing two men and wounding about 40 men, women and children. The strike failed.

Granitic Resistance

In 1953 Walter Reuther's U.A.W. finally succeeded in winning from Kohler Co. a skimpy one-year contract. Basis of U.A.W.'s claim to jurisdiction over the workers of a bathroom-fixture company: U.A.W. had a contract with the Briggs Manufacturing Co., which made both auto parts and the kinds of fixtures that Kohler makes.

After the one-year Kohler contract ran out, the union demanded a broadened agreement, including a seniority rule in layoffs, dues checkoff, binding arbitration of differences. U.A.W. also called for a wage increase, but that was not a basic issue: pay scales at Kohler were about in line with the rest of the plumbing-fixture industry.

Faced with Herbert Kohler's granitic resistance, U.A.W. trimmed its demands. But he kept on balking at even a seniority rule, and U.A.W. called a strike. Kohler laid in an arsenal of submachine guns, shotguns, clubs and tear-gas bombs, settled down for a long siege. Apparently, tough-fibered Herbert Kohler welcomed the strike as an opportunity to shake off Reuther & Co. A high Kohler official predicted that the strike would bring the company 20 years of peace, as had the broken 1934 strike.

"Jingling Money"

Some 2,800 of Kohler Co.'s 3,300 workers joined the strike, and for 54 days locked-arm mass picketing kept the plant shut down. Kohler placed ads in papers all over Wisconsin, offering new workers permanent jobs. Today, despite all the striker efforts to discourage workers with threats, name-calling, beatings and paint bombs, Kohler has some 2,500 employees at work.

With his union's prestige, and his own, committed to the Kohler strike, Walter Reuther saw to it that for two years U.A.W. supported some 2,000 strikers, providing them with rent, food and medical care, plus $25 a week "jingling money." But in 1956 U.A.W. had to give that up as too costly (to date, U.A.W. has poured in a fantastic $10 million), urged strikers to take new jobs. To find work, many of them had to move to other cities. Only 200 strikers are still drawing U.A.W. benefits.

In late 1955, having failed to defeat Herbert Kohler through picketing his plant and harassing his workers, Reuther & Co., with Kohler-like Germanic stubbornness, undertook a nationwide boycott of Kohler products. Today U.A.W. has more than a dozen full-time employees scattered around the U.S. who do nothing but urge plumbers, contractors, municipal officials, to boycott Kohler fixtures. Under union pressure, governing bodies in Boston, Los Angeles County and a scattering of small towns have passed resolutions against installing Kohler products in municipal building projects. U.A.WT. insists that all this is hurting Kohler badly. The family-owned Kohler Co. claims to be operating at a profit, but refuses to give out any figures.

Clash of Wills

Herbert Kohler shows no sign of surrendering. Last week U.A.W. publicly renewed its standing offer to accept "binding arbitration," and a Kohler spokesman promptly turned the offer down on the ground that the terms of a contract cannot be reached by arbitration.

On a basic issue, reinstatement of strikers, the two sides are committed to irreconcilable positions. U.A.W. has to cling to reinstatement as a bedrock-minimum demand. Kohler Co. has vowed that no worker will be laid off to make room for an ex-striker. But even if the reinstatement issue could somehow be arbitrated, the essential clash of stubborn wills would still remain. Herbert Kohler wants to keep U.A.W. out of his company altogether; Walter Reuther has to get U.A.W. in or suffer a humiliating defeat. Wielding the only weapon he has left, Reuther apparently intends to keep up the boycott until Herbert Kohler gives in or the company goes out of business. Compromise hardly seems possible any more. "It is almost sinful," says a U.A.W. official, "to have any labor dispute degenerate to the point this one has." Which was about as close as any interested party had come to the heart of it.

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