Word: labor
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Council of Economic Advisers, expects many strikes ahead, but is not too worried about their long-run effect on the economy. Indeed, some Administration policymakers profess a rather Olympian unconcern over the impact of strikes. Partly for that reason, the Administration is determined to stay out of labor disputes. Labor Secretary George Shultz emphasized its stand a week before the strike at a meeting of the Business Council, the elite group of 200 business leaders headed by G.E. Chairman Fred Borch. Briefing newsmen, Shultz predicted much labor unrest ahead, but declared that the Administration would not often intervene. Then...
...matter what the strike settlement, it will set a pattern for future labor negotiations as major contracts expire. The confrontations will involve railroads in December, shipbuilding and trucking in March, and meat packing and autos in September...
...trouble with General Electric as the testing ground for the President's hands-off policy is that the strike is as much ideological as economic. The enemy is what the unions call "Boulwarism," a labor-relations strategy unveiled in 1948 by Lemuel R. Boulware, then a G.E. vice president and now retired. Boulwarism is based on two tenets. First, the company should make a "firm, fair" offer at the start of negotiations and refuse to budge from it. Second, the company should engage in vigorous "employee marketing" to sell the merits of its offer...
Union leaders have hated Boulwarism for years, but division between G.E.'s two big unions-the International Union of Electrical Workers and the United Electrical Workers-kept them from making a successful issue over it in the past. Now the entire labor movement is committed to the fight to kill Boulwarism. The strike has created an unusual alliance of twelve unions as disparate as the teamsters, the steelworkers and the autoworkers. Meany has pledged the entire A.F.L.-C.l.O. to support the war "until the hour of victory...
...unions may have a friend in court. The day after the strike began, a federal court in New York attacked Boulwarism. It ruled that G.E. had violated the National Labor Relations Act in 1960 by refusing to furnish information requested by the union, trying to deal directly with union locals and presenting a personal-accident-insurance program on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Judge Irving Kaufman chided the company for its "patronizing attitude" and charged it with an overall failure to bargain in good faith...