Business: Nixon's Rookie of the Year

IT is the task of the Secretary of Labor, and probably his most delicate one, to set the tone of the Administration in major labor-management disputes. In that, George Pratt Shultz stands in sharp contrast to his activist Democratic predecessors, Arthur Goldberg and Willard Wirtz, who intervened frequently if reluctantly at Lyndon Johnson's behest. Before last week's strike against General Electric, Shultz held private meetings with company officials and union leaders. He has quietly helped to cool several other labor disputes, particularly in the airlines. But he firmly opposes direct and heavily publicized intervention. "We want the free collective bargaining process, to work," says Shultz. "We will not be trying to twist people's arms and get them to agree to something they are not quite ready to."

Shultz's conviction that imposed agreements are often fragile and brittle closely parallels President Nixon's thinking. The Labor Secretary has a talent for translating the President's theory into policy, and that has made him one of the most powerful men in Washington. As TIME Washington Correspondent Marvin Zim reports: "If politicians gave a rookie-of-the-year award, the prize for 1969 would go to Shultz. After coming to Washington without any political experience, he has clearly become a top Cabinet officer, an adviser whose counsel is sought and whose judgment bears extra distinction simply because it comes from him."

Clever Compromises. Nixon hardly knew Shultz when he appointed him Secretary of Labor. The President was impressed by a pre-election task-force report on manpower that Shultz had written and by the enthusiastic recommendations of his closest economic advisers, Arthur Burns and Paul McCracken. Mild-mannered and professorial, the new Secretary seemed at first to be another unremarkable technician in a Cabinet noted for its blandness. His speeches still resemble a lecture in Business Administration 1.

The reason that Shultz's influence has risen so rapidly is that he has performed well on a series of sensitive assignments. He pushed through Congress a compromise cutback in the Job Corps, placating supporters of the program by eliminating only the camps that had a poor record of placing graduates in jobs. In addition, he effectively broke a five-month impasse within the Administration over whether or not welfare payments should be extended to the working poor, a proposal that Arthur Burns, for one, argued would be too costly and would induce many people to stop working and go on welfare. Shultz suggested a middle course of providing "work incentives" that would enable families to keep a major part of their wages without losing their rights to welfare funds. To protests that it would cost too much, he replied, "$1 billion isn't anything if it will make the program work." Nixon agreed.