Summit County Labor News

Steel Strikers Get $1 Million From IUD

The AFL-CIO Industrial Union Dept. has voted a $1 million contribution to the Steelworkers, charging that the industry-forced steel shut-down is part of a "management conspiracy" aimed at crippling the entire labor movement.

At the same time the IUD Executive Board bluntly warned President Eisenhower that any use of Taft-Hartley injunctions "to force free workers back to their jobs against their will" would transform the White House into "a tool of the employer and a strike-breaking agency."

Noting that the President has repeatedly refused to intervene in the strike to the extent of naming an impartial fact-finding agency, the IUD said it would be "morally wrong" if Eisenhower intervened later "to bail management out" by forcing USWA members back to their jobs for an 80-day "cooling-off" period.

IUD President Walter P. Reuther, in a press conference following the board meeting, described the $1 million contribution as the first step in a drive to mobilize the department's full resources behind the USWA.

He said IUD activity in this direction would be meshed into the program of total labor support to be hammered out by the AFL-CIO General Board at an all-day meeting Sept. 18 during the third biennial convention at San Francisco.

Reuther called on the seven million members of unions affiliated with the IUD to augment organizational and moral support of the USWA by "joining striking steel workers on the picket lines as a demonstration of solidarity."

In New York, meanwhile, union and management negotiators resumed meetings with Director Joseph F. Finnegan of the U. S. Mediation and Conciliation Service, after a five-day recess. Neither USWA President David J. McDonald nor U. S. Steel's R. Conrad Cooper, chief industry spokesman, would comment on the joint sessions.

The IUD unanimously adopted a resolution declaring:

"The steel workers are standing firm in industry's line of fire on behalf of all wage earners. There is no doubt in our minds that steel management's demands upon the USWA are part of an industry-wide get-tough-with-labor's drive. We stand with them 100 per cent in their struggle and we recognize their fight as our own."

The resolution bitterly assailed the industry contention that wage increases "are bad for the nation as well as for the workers themselves," describing this claim as "the most transparent kind of hypocrisy." It accused management of refusing to share the fruits of productivity with either workers or consumers, despite record-shattering profits which added up to $2,250 for every worker in the steel industry during the first half of 1959.

"The steel companies come before the American people with dirty hands," the statement continued. "While preaching that higher wages are bad, the executives of these companies have cut themselves an even bigger piece of the profit cake.

Through stock option plans and so-called 'management incentive' plans they have enriched themselves fantastically while avoiding their fair share of the tax burden."

The IUD also ripped into the industry's demands for eight work rule changes that would force the union to "surrender working conditions won over two decades of collective bargaining."

It called management's charge of "featherbedding" an "outright lie," and declared that the companies are really engaged in "an attempt to restore the speedup and the stretchout in the mills."