Second Threat

As 500,000 workers in the nation's basic industry spent their days picketing or doing odd jobs at home, the U.S. this week faced another deadline that could shut down a second major industry. With contracts covering 82% of U.S. aluminum-producing capacity about to expire, the top U.S. aluminum makers--Alcoa, Reynolds, Kaiser--turned down labor's demands for the same wage package that the union failed to get from steel management. Barring a last-minute truce, the United Steelworkers (32,000 aluminum members) and two other unions (28,000 members) were ready to walk out. A stoppage in aluminum would slow planemakers, missilemakers, other defense contractors; customers have an estimated 30-to-60-day supply on hand.

Administration Pressure. So eager was Labor Secretary James Mitchell to bring about a steel truce that he went back to an 1888 statute (affecting the duties of the U.S. Labor Commissioner) to find authority for stepping into the dispute as a one-man factfinder. Said Mitchell: "In the interest of the American people, all the reasons for and circumstances surrounding the present strike should and must be determined. I will keep the President advised periodically as to the facts."

Mitchell, a topflight labor-dispute mediator before he went into Government, buried himself in the perplexities of steel profits, costs, wages, prices, productivity, unemployment. He will make no public report, but will exercise the subtle pressure of an Administration that sorely wants a solution.

Steel management received Labor Secretary Mitchell coolly; it believes that he has partially reversed President Eisenhower's original hands-off stand, and it resents Mitchell's feeling that the industry's soaring profits (see above) should be able to accommodate a few cents' hourly boost for the steelworkers.

Budget Pinch? While Mitchell grappled for the facts and a position, the steel impasse grew in bitterness. When 19,000 Bethlehem Steel workers in Lackawanna,

N.Y. and 5,200 at U.S. Steel's Fairless Works in Pennsylvania did not get the wages coming to them from work done in the last days before the strike, management explained that payroll clerks were also on strike. Other strikers lined up to collect up to a fortnight's back pay. But every week, workers lost more than $50 million in wages. Even if they win a 10¢ hourly wage hike, it will take them close to six months to make up for one week's lost wage.

The steel strike has forced layoffs of 50,000 railroadmen (carloadings ran 16% below normal) and 28,000 other workers --miners from West Virginia to Minnesota, sailors and longshoremen on the Great Lakes, teamsters throughout the East and Middle West. The Government is also a victim: a prolonged strike in steel is expected to cause revenue losses of $45 million a week. Said Treasury Secretary Robert Anderson: "A long strike could reduce revenues which could not be recovered in fiscal 1960 and could therefore contribute to a budget deficit."

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