Word: murrays
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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There was a logical reason for Big Steel's hard-nosed attitude. To compensate for wage increases, Steel wanted sizable price increases. The Administration was openly boasting that Steel would get no such thing. So Steel's refusal to bargain with Phil Murray was its only lever in its bargaining with the hostile and partial Government. Said Ben Fairless in Cincinnati last November: "Whether our workers are to get a raise, and how much it will be if they do, is a matter which probably cannot be determined by collective bargaining, and will apparently have to be decided...
Prepared Position. Faced with a steel strike on New Year's Day, Harry Truman telephoned Phil Murray in Pittsburgh just before Christmas, and asked Murray to hold off. Submit the dispute to the Wage Stabilization Board, said the President, or the Government will step in with a Taft-Hartley injunction against you. After pondering briefly, Murray accepted the WSB, which was, after all, like falling back to a prepared position...
...Because Murray had voluntarily postponed the strike, Truman felt himself bound not to invoke the Taft-Hartley law. The argument gained some logic when Murray postponed the strike 80 days while waiting for the WSB decision-an interval which balanced Taft-Hartley's 80-day cooling-off period. (Legally, the argument had no validity at all, as the Supreme Court later pointed out.) But the logic was soon swallowed up in the strange and wonderful performance...
Exit Charlie. In the public eye, the WSB recommendations gave Phil Murray's case the sanctity of an impartial Government verdict. Mobilizer Charles Wilson tried to convince Harry Truman that industry should get a $5-to-$6-a-ton price increase if it signed a wage agreement on the basis of the WSB report. But when Price Stabilizer (and good Democrat) Ellis Arnall heard of the Wilson-Truman conversations, Arnall persuaded the President that any price increase was unwise for two reasons: 1) economics, 2) politics. Wilson stormed back to his office and wrote out his resignation. Murray...
...findings, made their first offer-a package of 16?. Then they went to 20?, just 6? less than the WSB had recommended. But Murray wasn't interested. The steelworkers had already been tipped that the President would seize the industry if negotiations broke down. And they guessed (correctly) that, once Truman was running the steel mills, he would try to give them the full WSB terms...