Labor: More-Mow!

For organized labor's aging leaders, there is no tonic like triumph—even if it comes at the cost of the national interest. Thus, at a Chicago meeting of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. executive committee, President George Meany, 72, flourished the inflationary airlines strike settlement as though it were a trophy. That settlement, crowed Meany, splintered for all time the Johnson Administration's 3.2%-a-year wage-price-rise guideposts. Henceforth, he said, the unions will ask "what they are entitled to. And if it's over 3.2% , so be it."

Marching Fever. Between now and the end of 1967, such sentiments will be all too evident in contract negotiations involving 2,250,000 workers in key industries like electrical equipment, trucking, autos and rubber. Such is the marching fever that some unions can barely wait their turn. In Detroit last week, A.F.L.-C.I.O. Vice President Walter Reuther's United Auto Workers demanded that the contract, which still has a year to run, be renegotiated for some 200,000 pipe fitters, millrights and other craftsmen. The U.A.W. in sisted that such workers get a $1-an-hour wage hike, so as to put them on a par with other building tradesmen in the Detroit area. The Big Three turned the U.A.W. down cold, whereupon 1,300 workers picketed Chrysler headquarters with placards demanding "More—Now!"

While the sideshow went on in Detroit, General Electric and Westinghouse negotiators sat down with unions representing 180,000 electrical workers for what promises to be the main labor event in 1966. For weeks, G.E. has been fighting to prevent a coalition of eight unions, led by the International Union of Electrical Workers, into a single bargaining agent. Under present law, such a labor gang-up would seem to be patently illegal. But federal courts have ordered both G.E. and Westinghouse to talk to the unions as a group while the National Labor Relations Board frets over the problem.

Catch-Up. President Paul Jennings says that his I.U.E. members "know every bloody sentence" of the costly airline strike settlement. From both G.E. and Westinghouse, the I.U.E.-led unions are demanding, among other things, a guaranteed annual wage that would be automatically jacked up by

1) a cost-of-living wage escalator and

2) an "annual improvement factor," which inflates wages periodically according to rises in company productivity. All that would go on top of what the unions call a "one-shot catchup" —which means a bundle for all the benefits they feel they have missed over the last six years.

If these demands seemed unreasonable, they were not much more so than the ones made by 22,000 Transport Workers Union machinsts employed by Pan Am and American Airlines. Under pressure to outdo the rival I.A.M. machinists, the T.W.U. has since July deadlocked contract negotiations with obstinate calls for a 30% wage hike and ghoulish threats of what may happen if their demands are not met. Said one T.W.U. official last week:

"You wouldn't want an underpaid airplane mechanic to forget to change a tire, would you?" So far, Pan Am has managed to keep bargaining at a talking stage. But unless recommendations of a Presidential Emergency Board are accepted, American will probably be struck on Sept. 27.