Beyond Toleration

To the men who run the U.S. merchant marine, the slow erosion of union membership was at best a point of academic interest last week. A four-week-old strike by the International Longshoremen's Association had laid off 62,000 dockworkers from Maine to Texas, left 600 ships lying useless at anchor in Atlantic and Gulf Coast ports, and backed up some 14,000 freight cars under a pier embargo.

The strike's cost to the U.S. economy was already estimated at $600 million. The biggest losses were caused by the interruption of commodity shipments. In New York, Philadelphia and Baltimore, as sugar refineries ran out of raw sugar, 1,500 workers faced layoffs; on the East Coast refined sugar prices were about to be raised to a 40-yr. high of $10 per 100 lbs. The United Fruit Co., whose great white fleet is a major prop of more than one Latin American economy, managed to get some of its banana ships unloaded under court order. Even so, bananas began to run short in neighborhood markets, and housewives who succeeded in finding some paid 23-c- a lb. v. the pre-strike 17-c-. Crude rubber prices shot up as much as 10%, and Eastern carpet factories, cut off from the jute they need for carpet backing, talked of shutting down.

The impact of the strike was felt at the other end too. Puerto Rican industry, cut off from mainland suppliers, began to feel raw-materials shortages. The government of Pakistan waited impatiently for 100,000 tons of surplus U.S. wheat marooned in Gulf Coast ports. In West Germany 78,000 Volkswagen workers got an unwelcome two-day vacation from their assembly lines because the German auto company had 10,000 vehicles stranded in U.S. ports and another 5,300 waiting shipment on piers in Bremen and Hamburg.

For a few, the strike was a minor boon. U.S. steelmakers got rush orders for rolled sheet steel from Stateside customers they had previously lost to foreign competitors. But the overall damage to the economy was so great that President Kennedy warned that "the point of public toleration of this situation has been passed."

Since the strike-delaying provisions of the Taft-Hartley Act had been exhausted in the dock dispute, the President sought to unscramble the tie-up by naming a special three-man mediation board headed by Oregon's Senator Wayne Morse, who served as an arbitrator in West Coast dock strikes before World War II. The mission assigned to Morse by the President was to settle as quickly as possible the last remaining issue between the longshoremen and the shippers--a union demand for a wages-and-benefits package totaling 61-c- an hour over the next two years. Flying to New York, tough-talking Wayne Morse called both sides into almost round-the-clock negotiations, with Monday, Jan. 21, as the deadline for meaningful results. There were broad hints from the Administration that if the two sides failed to respond to Morse's ministrations, the President would seek from Congress authority to end the strike by compulsory arbitration.

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