Sagging Union Shops

Strictly speaking, 6,000 unionized hourly workers at seven Lockheed Aircraft plants were voting last week on a proposed three-year contract granting 28.3-c- in hourly wage increases, along with triple holiday pay and better vacations. But the real issue at stake was the fate of a union shop at Lockheed. The International Association of Machinists had demanded a union shop; a three-man fact-finding board came out for it; President Kennedy supported it. Alone in opposing it was Lockheed Chairman Courtlandt Gross, who insisted that every worker should be able to decide for himself whether he wanted to join the union. When the week's ballots were counted, 85% of the Lockheed voters moved to accept a contract that excluded any provision for a union shop, thus rejecting both the union's pleas and the whole concept of the union shop.

The outcome represented the I.A.M.'s fifth failure to get a union shop at Lockheed. Nor was the I.A.M. or the competing United Auto Workers doing much better in other West Coast aerospace plants. Unlike Gross, executives at North American Aviation, Ryan and Convair agreed to put the issue to a direct vote, but in each case the unions failed to gain the required two-thirds majority. The question is also being fought at Boeing, where management is holding out against a union shop even though employees in a non-binding poll have already voted overwhelmingly in favor of one. Only at Aerojet-General has the I.A.M. been able to get a union shop. At Douglas Aircraft it settled for an agency shop, in which workers are not forced to join the union but still must pay it the equivalent of dues.

The I.A.M.'s aerospace problems, in a new year of hardening labor negotiations, are further symptoms of the current predicament of organized labor (TIME, Jan. 25). Union-shop agreements now cover 74% of all U.S. workers covered by collective bargaining agreements, but the number of hourly workers eligible to belong to such unions is being shrunk by what labor experts call "erosion of the bargaining unit." In some industries, notably aerospace, hourly workers are soon upgraded to salaried workers; in others, they are being automated out of jobs. The number of hourly workers in auto plants has dropped from 82.9% of all employees in 1948 to nearly 70% in 1962. Organized labor faces other headaches, such as the right-to-work laws now on the books in 19 states and growing attacks on the legality of the agency shop. Altogether, these forces represent a continuing diminution of labor's power that amounts to its greatest crisis since the recognition battles of the early 1930s.

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