Kennedy (79 page)

Throughout his term this process and prodding continued, and with success. Average wage rate increases during Kennedy’s tenure were this nation’s lowest for any comparable period since the Second World War. They were generally within the “guidelines” and less than the increases then occurring in the plants of our trading competitors in Europe. This does not mean labor was poorly off under Kennedy. Productivity gains made noninflationary wage increases possible, and, as the recession ended, work weeks returned to normal. Consequently factory workers raised their average wages for the first time to $100 a week, and, with two and three-quarter million more men and women working, total labor income rose to record levels.

Nevertheless the fact remains that most union leaders did listen to Kennedy, and their wage demands were more moderate. “Part of it is political and emotional,” the President told me after his UAW speech. “I go to the Chamber of Commerce last week and talk about all we’re doing for business and profits—and they sit on their hands. I go to the UAW and warn them about the necessity of restraint, following the guidelines, no unjustified wage demands—and they cheer every word.”

Part of it was political and emotional. Labor leaders were unaccustomed to a Democratic President who thought there could be such a thing as excessive wage increases in peacetime. They recognized the truth of Labor Secretary Goldberg’s statement that “labor and management will both be making a mistake if they believe that the Kennedy administration is going to be prolabor.” They recognized that Kennedy had meant it when he stressed during the campaign that his would “not be a businessmen’s administration nor a labor administration nor a farmers’ administration, but an administration representing and seeking to serve all Americans.” Nevertheless, with a few outstanding exceptions (led by indicted Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa), most labor leaders regarded Kennedy as a friend—a friend who treated them not with favoritism but with dignity and equality.

They worked more closely with the President and his team on legislation than they ever had before. They were consulted on policy and politics. They were invited to the White House for conferences and ceremonies. Their names showed up on State Dinner lists and in nominations for appointive offices outside as well as within the Department of Labor. One union leader was made an ambassador. Another was named to the Communications Satellite Board of Incorporators, and another Deputy Housing Administrator. A former labor lawyer was named to the highest court in the land. A Chamber of Commerce publication, quoted by Barry Goldwater, expressed outrage that the Kennedy administration had filled “high government offices with the largest number of union officials and adherents in history,” citing the Departments of Commerce, State and Interior as well as those previously listed (but making no mention of the number of businessmen also appointed to high posts).

Appearing for AFL-CIO President George Meany at a Berlin Trade Union Conference on his 1963 trip to Europe, the President took Meany with him on the remainder of his Berlin visit and then introduced him throughout Ireland, a gesture not forgotten by Meany back in Washington.

The President in turn felt more at home with a labor audience. Addressing the AFL-CIO Convention in sunny Miami in December, 1961, the day after he addressed the National Association of Manufacturers in wintry New York, he commented, not too cryptically, “It’s warmer here today than it was yesterday.” After receiving an overwhelming welcome from the UAW the following May, he observed: “Last week, after speaking to the Chamber of Commerce and the Presidents of the American Medical Association, I began to wonder how I got elected. And now I remember.”

But labor and Kennedy had their differences. Labor disliked the
wage-price guidelines, often resented the government asserting the “national interest” in labor disputes, felt he overstressed the balance of payments as a limitation and still wanted a thirty-five-hour work week.

A related problem was labor’s long-standing request for changes in the Taft-Hartley Labor-Management Relations Act. The President wanted it changed also. He was particularly convinced that the Executive Branch should possess a wider arsenal of tools in national emergency strikes in addition to an injunction, although he did not hesitate to use the in-junctive powers when necessary. But he was equally convinced, from his experiences in the Senate—and labor came around slowly to his view—that raising the issue in the Eighty-seventh or Eighty-eighth Congress would only produce a worse law. He preferred to use existing laws, his inherent powers, and the initiative and imagination of his own office and Secretary of Labor to keep down the number of harmful strikes and to stave off harmful legislation.

The publicity accorded Secretary Goldberg’s activities in this area, making mediation proposals “on behalf of the President” in labor disputes ranging from toilets at General Motors to musicians at the Metropolitan Opera, led to still more charges of too much government intervention. Actually neither the Secretary nor the President wanted either labor or management to look to Washington for help in every dispute, and their formula was to act only when both sides in a major industry remained far apart after all other steps had been exhausted. They encouraged both sides to adopt new techniques for labor peace, more use of outside arbitrators and mediators, more machinery for constant contact and study (instead of at contract time only) and more voluntary recognition of the public interest (and the public’s impatience).

But when all else failed, the President felt an active Federal role was justified in any dispute with nationwide impact. The Metropolitan Opera was a unique exception, and when the President, after receiving wires from top opera performers such as Rise Stevens and Leontyne Price, asked Goldberg to intervene, he replied to his Secretary’s warning of criticism, “We’ll have to take that risk. Bricks and mortar are not the only assets of America.” “I was often termed in praise and criticism a very activist Secretary of Labor,” Justice Goldberg later recalled. “But really I was a Secretary of Labor for a very activist President.”

The activism worked, aided once again by some executive ingenuity and initiative, including the establishment by Executive Order of a Missile Sites Labor Commission to head off restrictive legislation, Presidential appeals by wire or in person to both labor and management representatives, mediation and arbitration by Secretaries Goldberg and Wirtz, and a variety of special boards, commissions and panels. Man-hours lost due to strikes during the Kennedy years were the lowest in
any three peacetime years since the war, less than half of their previous rate. The public, to be sure, was aware of the trouble areas. But while a few strikes were making headlines, the number of peaceful settlements was making history.

This is not to say that labor relations were everywhere rosy. In the maritime trades they continued to be chaotic. In the building trades they were restless. Unreasonable demands by a New York Printers Union and by the Flight Engineers Union were publicly denounced by the President at press conferences. A Presidential commission in the latter case finally succeeded in abolishing certain inefficient work rules—sometimes called “featherbedding”—by finding that three men instead of four were adequate for the cockpit of commercial jet aircraft.

As the tide of automation replacing men with machines rolled across the country, disputes over work rules and cries of “featherbedding” threatened to drown out the usual economic issues of collective bargaining. They also threatened the Kennedy administration with its most serious disruption of labor peace and its most difficult challenge from the labor movement—the railway labor dispute.

Throughout most of Kennedy’s term, the persistent threat of a nationwide rail shutdown obscured the labor peace which elsewhere prevailed. The problem was principally one of work rules and labor utilization in an industry where rigid jurisdictional lines and job guarantees had been carried over from the prediesel age.

Five unions representing the men who operate the nation’s railroads, beset by declining employment and membership and rising internal strains, presented for nearly four years a solid front of resistance to changes in their work rules necessitated by automation, demanded by the railroads and approved in whole or in part by a series of Presidential commissions, panels and Labor Secretaries. Collective bargaining had completely failed, with each side accusing the other of intransigence. The nation’s railroads were ready and eager to put their rules changes into effect, reducing the number of firemen in diesels, changing the roles of brakemen and similar moves. The unions, in turn, were ready to shut down all rail transportation if the rules were changed.

Some said, “Let them strike.” The unions accused the administration of encouraging management resistance by making clear no strike would be allowed. Management warned that it would accept no further government postponement of its right to lay off men. Both sides moved steadily toward a final showdown and strike.

But President Kennedy would not stand idly by and let the strike occur. He doubted those who said a walkout would bring both parties to their senses in a hurry. “This is no dollar-and-cents issue they can split down the middle,” he said. “This is do or die for both sides, and they’ll
stay out and stand it a lot longer than the country can stand it.” A strike of 200,000 union members would immediately idle 500,000 other railroad employees, and by its thirtieth day, his economic advisers estimated, the shutdown of affected industries would have idled some six million nonrailroad workers in the worst unemployment since 1930.

Consequently, in June of 1963, with the final “final” rules change and strike deadline approaching, the President asked both sides to try again, with a further postponement of any action. Labor Secretary Wirtz, who devoted night and day to the problem for months along with Assistant Secretary James Reynolds, made his own recommendations for a solution. As was true of each previous impartial recommendation, the railroads accepted and the brotherhoods would not.

With only one day remaining before a new deadline, the President, after consultation with the then Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg on the alternatives to legislation, recommended that the parties accept arbitration by the Justice. It was a drastic move, and Chief Justice Warren, whom I reached in Athens at the World Bar Association Conference, expressed his traditional reluctance to see Court members involved in other endeavors, a reluctance which the President shared but felt obligated to shed in this emergency. The railroads accepted the proposal; the unions foolishly did not. Not many weeks later, a union leader confided to me that they had made a mistake in rejecting Goldberg.

But that dramatic proposal at least served the purpose of awakening the nation and Congress to the crisis about to engulf them. A stormy session in the Cabinet Room with Democratic Congressional leaders convinced the President that they were wholly unwilling to face up to any legislation preventing a strike and obviously unable to pass it that day. That afternoon in a private meeting with the chief railroad negotiator, only hours before the deadline, the President obtained one more postponement to enable a special subcommittee of his Labor-Management Advisory Committee to report on the issues. His hopes for a new breakthrough in the interim were based on his appointment to that subcommittee of both a responsible rail union leader not involved in the strike and a progressive railroad president suspected of being “soft” by some of his colleagues. In the days that followed, agreement seemed several times within reach, and then faded each time.

Finally, all postponements, existing procedures and personal appeals having been exhausted, the only alternative to a catastrophic strike was legislation. All the legislative choices looked bad. Some would still permit a strike and some would merely freeze the status quo. Some wanted labor punished and some wanted it rewarded. Some proposed Presidential seizure of the railroads, a solution which neither solved the work rules problem nor recognized the railroad’s cooperative attitude. One agent of
the rail unions, who had channeled many a campaign contribution to members of the Senate Labor Committee, wanted that committee to arbitrate. Some management representatives wanted permanent amendments to the Railway Labor Act incorporating compulsory arbitration.

The President, hoping to avoid a precedent for undiluted compulsory arbitration in this or any other industry, decided in the end on a temporary resolution requiring the Interstate Commerce Commission to pass on employment security rules in dispute, weighing their effects on the parties and the public service. The Commission was already empowered to judge the employment security arrangements of railroad mergers. It was a logical and orderly solution which fulfilled the request of our legislative leaders that we send them no “pure” compulsory arbitration bill. But the rail unions, convinced of bias on the part of the ICC, lobbied vehemently against the proposal, and ultimately the ICC features were ripped out and a straight compulsory arbitration law passed and signed, the first in the nation’s peacetime history. No one was happy, and the rail unions blamed the President—but there was no strike, and the economy continued to grow.

The most direct and dangerous challenge by a powerful private interest group to the President’s anti-inflation efforts—and to the President’s office and trust—came from the steel industry in 1962.

While the dramatic confrontation between John Kennedy and United States Steel reached its climax in April of that year, the President’s own concern went back more than a year earlier. In one of his first post-inaugural conversations with Secretary Goldberg, a former counsel to the Steelworkers Union, he expressed concern over the effects any steel price rise would have on his balance of payments and anti-inflation efforts.

The President’s concern was well founded. Not only was steel one of our largest industries; its prices were also a direct or indirect cost in almost every other commodity. It played so large a part in the American economy, and its products were an essential part of so many other capital and consumer products, that its price actions had long been a bellwether for all industry. “As goes steel, so goes inflation” had long been the epigram which accurately summarized this nation’s price movements.