The Real Crisis in Steel

...Steel and to the steelworkers...

...but not to much purpose...

...It was a day past the deadline for stemming inflationary consequences of the steel strike perhaps worse than any that might have been triggered by a wage-and-benefits increase to workers...

...A junior executive may chafe at the parallel, but he is in one way the economic descendant of Henry Ford's five-dollar-a-day factory worker...

...and until some better method than "people's capitalism" comes along as a means to distribute the power to consume...

...True, in the land of long lunches, long weekends and long vacations, where the proper environment for creativity and thinking things through is so very important, featherbedding is at least sufficiently fuzzy so that the issue can be avoided...

...steel makers...

...Executives and professionals have increased in number during the past 10 years twice as fast as the total labor force...

...The Administration's conduct is a matter of wider concern...

...It is not entirely certain that they understand them even now...

...One is that in the first half of 1950, only one per cent, or 2.000, more industrial workers were required to produce one-half again as many tons of steel as were turned out a dozen years earlier, in the first half of 1947...

...Prominent among several recent such occasions is the steel strike...

...chiefly for lack of imagination on the part of Steelworkers President David J. McDonald, that it boils down to the right of workers to perform services which are clearly uneconomic—in short, to featherbed...

...Even one who sympathizes with the need for public relations men would likely see justice in the steelworkers claim...

...The question of economic choice aside (Can it be that the forces of technology have been unleashed to enable Life editorial writers to sit in righteous judgment on...

...81 cents in Italy vs...

...McDonald's counter-strategy might have been more effective had he not gotten himself in the position of defending inflation and feather-bedding (especially in a union not especially noted for featherbedding), and instead offered some constructive suggestions for carving out dead wood at the top, complete with readily available atrocity stories and some dizzying statistics—all the while demanding a shorter work week...

...Walter Reuther has announced that he will formulate the issue in the more socially acceptable terms of the auto worker's right to a shorter work week...

...To be complete, the picture lacked only a similar comparison of the money spent on contractual services, such as advertising, public relations, research and development, management, market and product consultation, etc...

...If this condition were limited to the steel industry, it might require no more than a close look at steel management: but it is not...

...of all things, featherbedding...

...It may be cause for alarm in these days of cliff-hanging developments, but it is nonetheless to be expected that the movement of events outstrips the movement of public opinion and attitudes...

...But the open-faced fervor with which he and his supporters took part in the campaign against "inflation" and "featherbedding...

...or even irresponsible, would, in a way, be more encouraging than evidence of mere incompetence...

...This is true, but it is no argument against the entitlement of steel workers to share in the benefits of technological progress with the people who are displacing them...

...In short, the issue is not management's right to replace men with machines, but its right to displace one kind of employe, the production worker, with other kinds, chiefly salesmen and the civil seivants of management...

...In this instance, the issue has been so put...

...As to President Eisenhower, the headline on the afternoon editions of the October 22 New York Post said all that needs saying...

...One ought not to have to spell out a program of things the President might have done before that point to relish the irony of the Post headline: IKE ORDERS PROBE OF TV QUIZZES...

...the corporate civil servant, and Parkinson's Law, are all we have...

...Left to decide, public opinion, one suspects, would not be so sure...

...For there has yet to be devised an accounting system which can measure the efficiency of an advertising agency, just as there is no way of finding out if...

...are cause for worry, and Europe's effort to modernize (S4.38 billion has been spent by the Organization for European Economic Cooperation countries on steel modernization since 1954) are cause for embarrassment to U.S...

...It required no special knowledge or faculty of mind to have anticipated that the showdown would come not over wages or fringe benefits, or at least that these would not be gotten to until the genuine issue was solved...

...Not the President of the United States, the President of United States Steel nor the President of the United Steelworkers of America gave any sign that they fully comprehended the forces which contributed to their predicament in not being able to reach a settlement until after much damage had been done...

...the Ford Foundation gets its money's worth...

...One may deplore either the economic choice which gave rise to corporate bureaucracies, the television and advertising industries, tail fins and four headlights, or the waste they entail...

...The principal negotiators could have served their own cause, as well as the cause of public understanding, had they used some imagination in presenting their cases...

...Machines have also, to be sure, swept many office workers out onto the job market, but not as relentlessly, and not on the floors where the thinkers and executives, now stratified into junior, middle and top, hang their hats...

...the "new middle class" and the "in-fluentials...

...it is a fair supposition, supportable by the direct evidence of anyone who has worked at the upper levels, that much of what passes for long-range planning or market research is, in fact, make-work...

...Put even more bluntly: Is there a greater economic necessity for a featherbedding public relations man than there is for a feather-bedding steel worker...

...The second fact is that over the same period, the steel companies increased EDWARD ENGBERG...

...Had the issue been so put, it would at the very least have enlivened the debate...

...This was the day on which Federal judges in Pittsburgh stayed execution of the Taft-Hartley injuniction, in response to which the ticker fell four minutes behind on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as stocks plunged in the last 12 minutes of trading...

...Anyone who has witnessed the boom in office construction in New York City alone has adduced the trend for himself...

...Nor is automation the issue, contrary to the steel industry's belated public relations efforts...

...steel makers cannot support both the "boom at the upper levels," as the Time advertisements put it, and the present work force...

...In the same period, the ranks of those who make their living from services swelled 40 per cent, and they turn out less per man hour...

...He consumes, and in consuming helps to keep the economy alive (and kicking) . He is the man the magazine space salesmen talk about when they talk about "discretionary income...

...The occasion for more urgent alarm is when those in power are not able to perceive things as they are and act on sound knowledge...

...and about two weeks too late to avoid a shortage of steel likely to affect the economy in other ways well into 1960...

...Roger Blough, the chief industry negotiator, could have dealt straightly with the issues and won himself some support had he offered to set up a fund, equivalent to, say, 10 days of struck plant overhead costs—roughly $90 million—to ease the shock for workers destined to lose jobs because of changes in the work rules...

...A stopped clock, as someone has noted, is right at least twice a day...

...One need only to have read Labor Secretary James Mitchell's fact-finding report last August to have discerned the two facts which made the strike, and much else in our present situation, comprehensible...

...As long as we persist in confusing virtue with a full day's work for a full day's pay...

...But all this means at the moment is that U.S...

...a former managing editor of Business International, now edits the Insider's Newsletter...

...with injustice to the steelworkers and in abuse of public opinion, suggests the worst...

...To second-guess the principal negotiators is perhaps a sport best left to the stockholders of U.S...

...Technological unemployment is an old problem, and it may reasonably be argued that the steel workers are merely a spectacular example of it...

...One wonders whether the Eisenhower Administration is even that frequently wrong...

...3.22 in the U.S...

...To be sure, European steel labor costs ($1.01 an hour in Germany...

...Evidence that the President had been wrongheaded...

...their administrative - clerical - professional payroll by one-half, an addition of 34,000 people...

...Since 1945, the industrial labor force has gone up only eight per cent, but it produces 40 per cent more per man hour...