Rail strike planned for Thursday
WASHINGTON (UPI) — Four shopcraft unions announced plans Tuesday to strike the entire U.S. railway system starting Thursday, and nothing but emergency action by Congress stood in their way.
There was no immediate White House reaction to the announcement by William W. Winpsinger, the unions' chief spokesman in 15 months of contract negotiations with rail management that have ended in complete deadlock.
The strike call was issued one day after U.S. District Judge Howard F. Corcoran ruled that the unions' chief spokesman in 15 vidual railroads as they did Jan. 31 against Union Pacific. That walkout provoked management plans to shut down all railroads with a retaliatory lockout of employees.
The threat of a rail shutdown was averted by court restraining orders against selective strikes or lockouts — twice extended — that finally expired with Corcoran's injunction Monday against what management terms a "whipsaw strike."
That left the unions the alternatives of appealing Corcoran's ruling, issuing no strike call or striking all the 128 major railroads which are members of the National Labor Railway Conference.
They decided on a general strike to begin at 12:01 a.m. (EST) Thursday, even though Winsinger said "from the beginning we have made it clear . . .
Pompidou leaves
PARIS (UPI) — President Georges Pompidou returned to Paris early today from an official visit to the United States where, despite some brushes with pro-Israel demonstrators and a bomb threat against his plane, he said his eight-day trip had "served the cause of peace."
18 KANSAN Mar. 4 1970
that we want to avoid a nationwide strike.
Congress was considered almost certain to vote some form of compulsory arbitration to settle the contract dispute and end a rail walkout, which lawmakers consider intolerable to the nation's economy. President Nixon has no further legal recourse in the dispute.
"Only the Congress can provide the remedy now," Wip-singer told newsmen.
Even before the unions announced their decision, locals of at least two of them—the Boilermakers and Sheet Metal Workers—struck the Penn Central Co. rail yards in Cleveland, Ohio, in defiance of Corcoran's injunction.
Congress has legislated binding settlements of rail labor disputes twice in the past eight years, the last time in 1967 to end a two-day railroad walkout.
The four unions represent 48,000 machinists, electricians, sheet metal workers and boilermakers who already have accepted an 18 per cent wage increase in two years, from $3.60 an hour for top journeymen to $4.28.
But negotiations hit a snag over a work rule proposed by management that would permit members of one union to perform incidental work of another craft in small shops. This proposal was rejected by the Sheet Metal
Workers, smallest of the four unions, and not even AFL-CIO President George Meany's last-minute intervention was able to resolve the issue.
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