Word: brennans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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During his first four months in office, Labor Secretary Peter J. Brennan managed to remain all but invisible: he held no formal press conferences, granted precious few interviews and avoided appearing before Congress. Last week the former hardhat from Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen finally surfaced to detail for a House subcommittee the Nixon Administration's minimum-wage bil−and with that single appearance, Brennan provoked a maxi-split with his old colleagues in the union movement. Said AFL-CIO President George Meany: "We are aghast that Brennan has so completely abandoned the trade-union principles...
Judged by the overall figures, what Brennan said hardly seemed to warrant that reaction. He suggested raising the minimum wage nearly 44% over the next four years, to $2.30 an hour. But men like Meany and Wurf learned long ago to read the fine print in any proposal. They were predictably annoyed that this year's increase would only be from $1.60 to $1.90 an hour, a dime less than the Administration itself proposed two years ago. The earnings of a full-time worker who got the minimum wage this year would stay well below the poverty line...
...Brennan further argued for allowing employers to pay teen-age workers as little as 80% of the adult minimum wage, or $1.52 an hour this year−less than they get now. Among union men that proposal is known as the "McDonald's plan" because it has been strongly pushed by the McDonald's hamburger-stand chain, which employs 80,000 teen-agers−more than all but a few businesses in the nation. McDonald's is headed by Chairman R.A. Kroc, who gave $250,000 to the Nixon campaign last year...
...sense of loyalty, both to me and to Nixon." Gray and Finch helped Nixon narrowly carry California, but when the national election was lost, Gray moved to New London, Conn., where he had been stationed at the submarine base. He joined the law firm of Sui-man, Shapiro, Wool & Brennan. Gray specialized in trusts, estates and taxes; he also spent many hours without charge to close the estates of sailors who went down with the submarine Thresher in 1963. Although New London is not big league in legal circles, it took Gray six years to become a partner...
Nixon's appearance at the AFL-CIO meeting and the new flexibility in wages were only the two freshest roses tossed by the White House lately in labor's path. Meany was respectfully consulted on both Dunlop's appointment and that of Peter Brennan, a New York City hardhat leader who became the first union man to head the Labor Department in almost 20 years. The President also took the extraordinary step of inviting Meany to submit his personal nominees for several top-ranking jobs in the Housing and Urban Development, Commerce and Defense departments. Finally, Nixon...