Word: steels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...several states, Hoffa permitted trucking firms, against drivers' protests, to save money by paying drivers an extra 1¼ or 1½ a mile in lieu of more expensive fringe benefits. A confidential memorandum from an Ohio trucking executive reports a conversation with George Maxwell, head of the Steel Truckers Employers Association. Says the memo, photostated by McClellan committee investigators: "George told me that in 1954 he made five separate deals with Hoffa concerning percentage pay rates [the percentage of the trucking fee that a company pays a driver who owns his own truck]. He had one company decreased...
Management insists on greater control over such working conditions, which it claims nurture featherbedding, and it refuses to grant a penny in wage hikes unless it can increase efficiency by changing work practices as it sees fit. Otherwise, say the steel companies, any wage hike would be inflationary. Union Boss David McDonald charges that any changes would have the effect of "reducing the employees to mill slaves and the union to an ineffective puppet." He has even more personal reasons for standing firm: rank-and-file union members are deeply aroused over the threat to local working practices, and they...
Source of Friction. While the companies once proposed eight contract changes, they have now reduced them to four, involving changes in past working practices, penalties for wildcat strikes, scheduling hours of work, and vacations. Of these, says U.S. Steel President Walter Munford, the past-practices clauses "have become the source of more friction and grievances than any other section of the labor agreements." In its efforts to get them changed, management is pinning its hopes on a single clause that it has drawn up. But the clause is completely unacceptable to the union, and even impartial arbitrators...
Even under the present contract, the steel companies have a great deal of power to change working conditions to improve efficiency. Arbitrators have long conceded management's right to change any practice-e.g., crew reductions-if it has put in new machines or otherwise eliminated the basis for the practice. During the 13 years that the union has had past-practice clauses, U.S. Steel has won 145 of the 186 cases that have been submitted for arbitration...
...winter Riviera for the Western world, he expects to lose money there, "for the foreseeable present." Usually, Rockefeller invests for the long pull; he expects investments to take ten years, or even 20, to pay off. Some never do. He has lost heavily on a company to build steel prefab houses (buyers did not buy) and another to tin tuna in Samoa (the fish did not bite...