Word: wage
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
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...
...three months, the WSB heard witnesses and deliberated. At the outset, Chairman Nathan Feinsinger, a law professor, was instructed that the board was not to consider the ability of industry to pay wage increases. Once, when Economic Stabilizer Roger Putnam telephoned Feinsinger to find out how things were going, Feinsinger abruptly told Putnam that his question was improper (although Putnam was supposed to be working on the same case). During one last grueling session of the board, Feinsinger fainted dead away. The steelworkers themselves almost fainted with joy when they saw the results. The WSB, over the objections...
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...
...Murray's first act was to propose to Ben Fairless that together they tour U.S. steel plants to lay the base for a lasting labor-management relationship. Fairless jumped at the offer, and, as his first test, went with Murray to a meeting of the strike-scarred Steelworkers Wage Policy Committee at the Mayflower Hotel...