Word: steels
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...willing to give perhaps 10? an hour (TIME, June 29) if the union permitted them to reclassify jobs, eliminate featherbedding to take full advantage of automation, make other changes to improve efficiency. Such an exchange, the industry figured, would not boost overall payroll costs, thus causing a rise in steel prices. But the union rejected the swap, arguing that management's talk of featherbedding was "pure, unadulterated bunk...
...steel industry had good reasons for believing that its new line was not only hard but realistic and well timed. It was well prepared for a strike; steel customers had enough inventory for seven weeks or more, would still be there as a clamoring market for steel once a strike was over. Steelmen also counted on the fact that U.S. steelworkers, already the highest paid of the Big Three unions, are aware that a wage-and-price boost might bring more inflation to nullify a pay rise, give a boost to foreign competition, and eventually cost jobs in the mills...
Give & Take. A sinewy (6 ft., 175 Ibs.), hard-muscled man with a slightly bulbous nose and brown hair etched with grey, Blough had not only devised the industry's new policy but would have the most say in whatever settlement the steel industry would make. He is no rough-and-tumble, up-from-the-mill steelman but a lawyer who got into steel via a Wall Street firm, thoroughly learned the business by hard-slogging homework...
Blough believes that collective bargaining is a matter of give and take, and that industry has been doing most of the giving. As head of Big Steel's $3.7 billion empire and 232,000 employees, he presents his reasons for crying "halt" as if he were preparing a legal brief. Says he: "The results of collective bargaining between the companies and the steelworkers' union have been characterized by unsustainable cost increases, major strikes and government intervention. It is time to raise the question as to whether nationwide wage policies, industry-wide strike power, the ability to shut down...
...Grand Alliance. The entire atmosphere in Big Steel's union relations has changed since Blough took over the company from Benjamin F. Fairless in 1955. Unlike Ben Fairless. who used to tour the steel mills with McDonald, Blough believes in keeping the union brass at a distance, never hesitates to take on the union in public. His hard new line is no quickly thought-up policy; as long ago as last fall, he met with other steel executives to work out the strategy for holding the line on the union...