Word: steels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Instead, the President ordered the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service's Director Joseph F. Finnegan to help work out a voluntary settlement. After separate sessions with the steelworkers and with the Big Steel negotiators, headed by U.S. Steel's Executive Vice President R. Conrad Cooper, Finnegan was grim, saw no hope for an "easy or early solution...
Basic & Bothered. The grimness came with the sudden realization by pickets and public that management had its teeth clenched. Setting a post-World War II precedent for a major industry, the steel companies let the negotiations sputter to an end without making even a minimum money offer for the workers to think about. The steelworkers had offered to settle for the same terms they won in 1956 after a 36-day strike: a three-year contract with a yearly raise of about 15? an hour, plus a cost-of-living escalator clause. Management's counteroffer: either...
Management's tough stand was no idle pose. Big Steel, led by U.S. Steel Corp.'s Board Chairman Roger M. Blough, was bent on halting steel's relentles's postwar trend: ever higher wages, ever higher prices-both up about 150% since 1945. With U.S.-made steel all but priced out of foreign markets and losing domestic markets to low-cost foreign steel (TIME. July 20), the steel industry finally decided to hold out against a wage boost unless the union conceded management more freedom to trim costs by cutting down on "featherbedding and loafing...
...steel companies held fast. Wrote the industry negotiating team to Dave McDonald: "When you are ready to recognize that collective bargaining is a two-way street, then progress will be possible." For a quarter of a century, collective bargaining had been pretty much a one-way street. If the steel industry could make it a two-way street, the steel strike might prove to be the U.S.'s most momentous labor-management clash since the great organizing battles of the 1930s...
...example of featherbedding, Republic Steel Co. pointed to crane operators. Years ago, each mill crane got a double crew so that crane-men overheated from lifting hot steel could get out and cool off. New cranes are air-conditioned, but they still have double crews...