up a three-man investigating committee to look into charges against the local and its officers. In Philadelphia, another wildcat strike (5 days) ended on March 3 as longshoremen returned to work at the urging of local leaders after a Federal Judge had fined the union $200,000 ($100,000 a day) for not ending the stoppage. The strike began because of a controversial setback clause in the Longshoremen's contract with the Philadelphia Maritime Trade Association which says that if an employer called a gang to work at 8 a.m. and the ship failed to arrive, the employer could have the men begin work at 1 p.m. provided he gave them 1 hour's pay for the morning and 4 hours' pay for the afternoon. Boston's longshoremen, by a vote of 357 to 213 on February 6, gave local leaders the go-ahead to negotiate an annual pay guarantee and to establish a hiring hall and end shapeups in return for allowing automation on the docks and a reduction in the size of work gangs from 21 to 18 men. Of the 1,084 ILA members in Boston, 202 worked less than 400 hours during the October 1963-September 1964 period. Some 125 of these men worked less than 50 hours during this period. Union leaders said that by setting up a central hiring hall and eliminating the shapeup system, a more permanent work force could be established and men would be on the job at 8 a.m. instead of losing time in getting from the shapeup to the ship." Transportation Laws and Rulings U.S. District Judge Alexander Holtzoff ruled on March 3 that railroad operating unions may not strike to compel carriers to rehire firemen and trainmen who lost their jobs under a Federal arbitration law. He said that the unions would have to negotiate on these matters under the procedures of the Railway Labor Act. The case involved the Trainmen's union, the Conductors and Brakemen (Ind.), and the Switchmen. Although the Locomotive Firemen were not party to the suit, Judge Holtzoff made specific references to them as they have lost 17,500 of the 22,500 jobs that were eliminated by the arbitration award. Judge Holtzoff said that union proposals to restore jobs existing before the arbitration award would be unreasonable and would defeat the purpose intended by Congress. He also ruled that the railroads may not discharge any more men under the award after its expiration date of March 31 in the case of Fireman, and of January 25 for the other unions. 7 On February 16, the New York State Legislature passed a bill sponsored by Governor Rockefeller exempting 35,000 transit workers from the penalties of the Condon-Wadlin Act. The bill's passage overruled an earlier court decision and permits the New York Transit Authority to grant pay increases won by the transit workers after a 12-day strike. A week earlier, State Supreme Court Justice Irving H. Saypol had upheld a taxpayer's contention that payment of the wage increases would be a violation of the provision of the act that prohibits pay raises for 3 years to any public employee who strikes. After Justice Saypol's decision, transit workers had threatened to strike again if there was further delay in payment of the wage increase. Government Arbitrator John T. Dunlop awarded 3,200 elementary school teachers in Newark, N.J., a minimum raise of $700 for the 1966-67 school year. An additional $200 was awarded teachers already getting maximum salaries, and in February 1967 teachers with 20 years of service or more were to receive an additional $200. Salaries prior to the award ranged from $5,600 to $10,000. Newark teachers, represented by the Newark affiliate of the National Educational Association, had struck for 2 days on February 10 and 11. The National Teachers Union had struck the school system on December 2 and 3 over which group would represent the city's teachers. Some 2,300 Montana State Highway Department maintenance, engineering, and office employees received a $25-a-month increase on February 16. The State Highway Commission approved the increase after negotiations with the Montana State Council of the State, County and Municipal Employees Union. 5 See "Hiring Practices for Longshoremen," Monthly Labor Review, November 1965, pp. 1289-1296. • See Monthly Labor Review, January 1964, pp. 70-71. 7 See Monthly Labor Review, February 1966, p. 190. AFL-CIO Executive Council The AFL-CIO Executive Council held its quarterly meeting at Bal Harbour, Fla., February 2128. Among the statements issued by the Council was a call for an increase in the $1.25-an-hour minimum wage to $1.75 by 1968 in steps, and extension of coverage to an additional 7.9 million workers. The Council rejected the administration's sug 8 gested 3.2-percent guideposts for wage increases; called for continued efforts to repeal section 14(b) of the Taft-Hartley Act and greater utilization of the 1964-65 Civil Rights Acts; and urged Congress to "revitalize" the unemployment compensation system at its current session. 8 See Monthly Labor Review, March 1966, pp. 278–281. Book Reviews and Notes Deus ex machina Industrial Relations in Engineering. By Arthur Marsh. New York Pergamon Press, Inc., 1965. 342 pp., bibliography. $5, paperback. Arthur Marsh has been a tutor in industrial relations at Oxford University, England, since 1956. He has produced a classic textbook of the industrial relations system in a major British industry, or rather, as Dr. Allan Flanders points out in the Foreword, a complex of industries which has no identity apart from the sharing of a common set of arrangements for negotiation and the settlement of disputes. A result of much diligent research, and with an eye particularly on the role of shop stewards, this work surveys the complex structure of industrial relations and should be of immense value both to experienced practitioners and to newcomers in the field. It reviews in detail the historical development and existing pattern of negotiations; and sets out, in appendixes, the structure of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions and the Engineering Employers' Federation, the precise nature of their procedure, and other agreements, including the "Package Deal Agreement" of December 1964. Other appendixes give details relating to model indentures for apprentices, the training of shop stewards, collective bargaining on redundancy, and industrial relations in the British automobile industry. There are statistics on the numbers of workers and the size of their employers, on earnings and overtime, and on strikes of various kinds. The bibliography is comprehensive and there is a very satisfactory index of the whole work. There has been much criticism of the industrial relations record of the British engineering industry, particularly the automobile section of it, based on the diversity of trade union interests. Certainly there are 34 constituent unions of the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions (CSEU), but there are also 39 local employers' associations in the Engineering Employers' Federation. The CSEU represents more than 1.8 million workers and the employers' federation represents some 4,500 companies with a total of 2 million workers. The employers' federation is concerned solely with industrial relations while the workers' CSEU has wider interests. It has been said of the Engineering Employers' Federation that it was brought into existence solely to fight the unions and to get rid of trade unions altogether. Having failed in this purpose it has, some say, been able to impose on the engineering unions "the most one-sided arrangement to be found in the whole of industrial negotiation" as it operates in Great Britain. Those who read Arthur Marsh's account of the origins, organization, and practice of the employers' organization will be able to form their own views on this appraisal. His account is, in my view, free of bias and ulterior motive. Mr. Marsh is equally detailed in his account of the organization of the trade union side, its problems and perspective. He does not gloss over the weaknesses of either side or of the procedures they have created. The merits of continuous or regular consultation are perhaps obscured by the structural defects of the system. This is a pity because, as we all know, evil communications corrupt good manners. -H. F. B. FANE Counsellor (Labour) British Embassy, Washington, D.C. Directness and Candor Cost, Prices, and Profits: Their Cyclical Relations. By Thor Hultgren. New York, National Bureau of Economic Research, 1965. 229 pp. (Studies in Business Cycles 14.) $6, Columbia University Press, New York. This volume, latest in the National Bureau's Studies in Business Cycles, is an important, basic reference work for students of the business cycle. It should contribute, if it has not already done so, to the development or improvement of business cycle statistical indicators, such as those published by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. Major attention is devoted to manufacturing industries, but there are also sections on railroad transportation, public utilities, and, very briefly, construction and trade. Hultgren analyzes, in great detail, the shortterm movements in unit labor costs, prices, and profits as they relate to stages of expansion and contraction of the business cycle. He shows, for example, that unit man-hours and unit labor costs tend to decline in periods of expansion and rise in periods of contraction. The reverse is true of prices and profits. If this sounds familiar, it is, perhaps, because many of the findings have been previously published in occasional papers and in the annual reports of the National Bureau. The author's style is simple and direct-a welcome relief from the type of economic analysis which so often is written for (and understood only by) the jargon-wise expert. If the discussion is sometimes difficult to follow, it is because of the intricacy of the subject. Hultgren is also refreshingly honest in setting out the limitations of the basic data available for analysis. Both of these factors directness and candor-make it easier to detect possible defects in the findings or conclusions. In many cases, among industries or in different parts of the business cycle, unit man-hours, unit. costs, or unit profits do not follow the "expected" trends. How much of this deviation results from inadequacies of the basic data, such as limited coverage of the price deflators and noncomparability of output series with hours or earnings series? Of course, if the deviations from expected trends are related to data deficiencies, Hultgren's case may be strengthened rather than weakened. Expansions and contractions in the business cycle are identified but not quantified, i.e., there is no differentiation between large and small increases (or decreases) in output and the related trends. Perhaps such variables can be taken into account in future studies. The data deficiencies and lack of quantification raise questions about some of Hultgren's comparisons among different types of industries. For example, he concludes that changes in volume of business are more closely related to costs on railroads than in factories. This may be true, but are the limitations of the manufacturing data more responsible for these divergent findings than the real facts? Hultgren has undoubtedly considered these matters. His book shows evidence of painstaking research and attention to detail. Unfortunately, the various series studied end in 1961. It would be very interesting to learn how the variables acted and reacted during the long expansion following that date. -LEON GREENBERG Assistant Commissioner for Productivity and Technological Developments Bureau of Labor Statistics Big Versus Bigger Dynamics of the United States Automobile Industry. By Charles E. Edwards. Columbia, S.C., University of South Carolina Press, 1965. 297 pp., bibliography. $6.75. This is primarily an inquiry into how pigmies can survive amidst giants in an industry where the pigmies themselves are gigantic. American Motors Corp., Studebaker Corp., and their corporate antecedents are subjected to well-organized and carefully documented analysis of their problems, solution efforts, solutions, and failures, from the end of World War II to the early sixties. This decidedly worthwhile book begins with detailed histories of the two companies' finances, products, people, sales, pricing, philosophies, 210-767 0-66--5 methods of coping with their problems, and their positions vis-a-vis the rest of the industry. Thereafter, it explores market size, management attitudes, and other aspects of "nonscalar" problems (translation: problems not concerned with size). It dissects the factors in automotive success of company size, manufacturing problems, distribution aspects, marketing, diversification, and, finally, historical events. The conclusions tend to indicate that size alone generates success-size enough to use all available physical capacity, enough to produce regionally rather than at one central location, enough to market adequately. But the conclusions are at least partly tentative. And nowhere is there the answer of how to achieve size-a car company, it seems, lives in dimensions which have agonizingly slowly built up out of the past; and of late the big have gotten bigger while the small have gotten smaller. The probable fact-probable because no one can be sure is that much of passenger car success or failure can be explained only in terms of sociology (the herd instinct, imitativeness, and so on) and in terms of money maxims which time has so often proved true ("them as has, gets," or as the author himself remarks, "it takes money to make money"). These lie outside the purview of this book, yet they bulk large in auto industry dynamics. As in production and marketing, labor aspects played a share in the companies' histories, but not a make-or-break share. The companies' labor costs were relatively high and their operations inefficient in much of the period under analysis. But an immutable fact was at play in those years which the author covers only by inference if at all: The managements had the choice of buckling under labor's demands, as they did, or resisting them and taking strikes which might have brought crisis even closer in the long postwar period when sales accrued to anyone with cars to deliver. "Don't you think," the president of one independent asked this reviewer during those times, "that it's worth 23 cents more an hour not to go through all these strikes the big fellows are getting?" -STANLEY H. BRAMS Publisher, Labor Trends Harried State Essays in Fiscal Federalism. Edited by Richard A. Musgrave. Washington, The Brookings Institution, 1965. 301 pp. (Studies in Government Finance.) $6. This is the season when States are coming back into style, when federalism, as a concept, is no longer to be treated as a mere phrase to cloak the embarrassing situation of 13 entities too proud to surrender to a central government. It is almost generally agreed that there is a need for the strong State government-indeed there is a growing recognition that municipal governments are supposed to be sound as well. The question remains whether the States, pounded into inefficiency and neglect by their own sense of disutility and Washington's concurrence, can continue their progress along the comeback trail. Now that people are convinced that the States will be around for a while, they are scurrying around to find a fiscal program to underwrite their functions. In a somewhat peculiar way, Fiscal Federalism addresses itself to this problem. It is not really a coherent book systematically exploring this issue; it is a collection of essays, culled from doctoral theses written under the supervision of Richard A. Musgrave. Dr. Musgrave's function, I assume, was to keep the big picture constantly swinging before his students' eyes, and he does a good job of reducing it to writing in his introduction. The essays themselves intensively inspect some of the most interesting and controversial border areas of the picture: the countercyclical capabilities of State and local financing; regional attacks on unemployment; whether expenditures turn tax policy regressive to progressive or vice versa; how voters express their demand for public services. Only Benjamin Bridges' essay, "Allowances for State and Local Nonbusiness Taxes," really focuses on fiscal federalism; he appraises the ability of credit plans to shift revenue from higher to lower levels of government. As a result of his study, he vigorously opposes the present system of deductions on the ground of both inequity and inefficiency. -MONROE E. PRICE Assistant to the Secretary of Labor |