Word: steel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...threat of breakdowns in the machine can never be discounted; there is no guarantee that the old wage-price spiral with excessive labor demands resulting in inflationary prices, will not reappear. But the steel settlement just concluded is a typical example of labor's present condition and its relations with industry. A strike, while the threat was real enough did not materialize; increasingly, labor gets its results not through strikes but through other pressures, including the psychological. Steel negotiations were relatively relaxed; the big issue was not pay but fringe benefits. Labor has won the wage battles...
Moreover, automation has already brought workers more leisure. The trend is to reduce the time that men work through longer vacations, sabbaticals, earlier retirement. Such benefits constituted nearly half of last fortnight's steel settlement. The United Auto Workers operate under a contract granting them bereavement pay, funeral leave and Christmas bonuses. Their "supplemental allowance" scheme is known to members as the Honeydew Project-because the men can retire earlier, go home, and hear their wives say, "Honey, do this-Honey, do that." Senior auto and steelworkers get 13 weeks' annual vacation. The United Brewery Workers are contractually...
More reasonable and less wasteful is the contract between California's Kaiser Steel Corp. and the United Steelworkers. Under it, any worker displaced by automation goes into an employment "reserve," receives his average wage of the past while being retrained and waiting for reassignment. Kaiser also offers vacation time based on productivity gains. Variations of the Kaiser-Steelworkers' arrangement are being tried out elsewhere with success. The Electrical Workers, for instance, are organizing training courses to teach members to work in atomic energy and other advanced fields. But organized labor as a whole has hardly begun to face...
...conclusion, based on long-term estimates of productivity: prices and wages should not rise more than 3.2% annually. The guidelines have remained as official policy under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Last week they won their biggest victory when Lyndon Johnson invoked them to help squeeze a steel settlement out of labor and management...
Though the President was clearly delighted that the crucial wage rise in steel equalled 3.2% (see THE NATION), he could not take much satisfaction in other recent settlements. Over the past twelve months, pay increases of between 3.5% and 4% have been won in such major industries as aluminum, cement and glass. Container workers won a 3.5% increase, auto workers a 4.8% boost, California construction workers a 6.1% raise for each of the next three years. Last week's maritime-strike settlement, while adhering to the 3.2% formula for its first year, will actually hike the cost of employing...