Atomic Energy

The Atlantic Report on the World Today

IT is a superhuman task to fit atomic energy into the conventional patterns of life. One case in point is the adjournment of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission sine die, with the decision to place before the entire 58-nation General Assembly in Paris this month the impasse which has resulted despite more than 200 meetings over a period of two years. President Truman’s reluctant signing of the bill extending terms of the members of the United States Atomic Energy Commission for a standard two years instead of the varying periods of one to five years which he had urged, and which the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 had specified, is another.

The first of these events warns us that unless and until the nineteenth-century notion of national sovereignty is relaxed and liberalized in a major portion of the world, man’s control of the staggering energy locked in the nucleus of the uranium atom will continue to be the occasion for an unrestrained race in devastating armament.

The second event — amendment of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946 to extend the terms of the commissioners for a flat two years — emphasizes that a full understanding of the value of continuity in administrative and policy-making responsibility in this nation’s atomic energy operations has not yet been attained. It is true that the two-year extension avoided recess appointments — appointments which might have meant, given a Republican victory in November, the ousting of some or all of the commissioners in January. But it is equally true that the establishment of June 30, 1950, as the end point for all five terms can result at that time in the appointment of an entirely new group, without the valuable continuity of direction provided by staggered terms.

No strike at Oak Ridge

Meanwhile, in another area of the atomic energy undertaking, an event of a different order, yet possibly of more lasting significance, occurred. Outwardly it was no more than the settlement of a labor dispute through negotiation between the union and the company concerned, under the aegis of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service — the sort of accomplishment which passes with little notice week by week. Intrinsically, however, the successful conclusion of the difference, without resort to a strike, represented definition of jurisdictions and the reconciliation of opposing convictions.

The signing of a new work contract between the AFL Atomic Trades & Labor Council, representing 875 employees of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory — otherwise known as X-10 — and of the Carbide & Carbon Chemicals Corporation, which operates X-10 as contractor for the Atomic Energy Commission, formally ended the controversy. Providing an average wage increase of 15½ cents an hour over the previous average $1.38 an hour, and including vacation and other benefits, the contract is effective until June 18, 1949. Some six months of differences, with over three months of actual negotiation, preceded this solution.

X-10 is a research center possessing the only nuclear reactor and processing facilities capable of the safe and efficient production of radioisotopes in the kinds and amounts desired for utilization in medicine, chemistry, industry, and agriculture. It also produces special materials of importance to the general atomic energy program. The reactor is the most advanced form in the United States for research — one of the two in the world — and is used for both general research and special studies bearing on the plutonium production operations at the Hanford installations of the Commission.

Chemical, physical, metallurgical, and nuclear properties of uranium and plutonium are under study at X-10. Health physics — the biological effects of radiation — is another focus of X-10’s work, as is chemical research looking toward process improvement. In coöperation with the Oak Ridge Institute of Nuclear Studies, in which educational and research institutions of the Southeastern states participate, X-10 shares in the training of much needed scientific personnel.

The 800-odd carpenters, plumbers, and other skilled craftsmen represented by the AFL Council, who are employed in the work of building, tearing down, rebuilding, altering, and maintaining the structures needed by scientists in experimental work and in the production of isotopes, obviously have a key position in this wide program — a position whose critical importance was recognized clearly by the union authorities.

The importance of the X-10 program to the total atomic energy effort was similarly recognized: by Carbide & Carbon in taking on the operation of X-10 as a patriotic duty at the direct request of the Commission: by the Commission in its declaration that a continuing work stoppage at X-10 would imperil the national safety; and by the President in invoking the Taft-Hartley Law and naming a board of inquiry, after whose report an injunction against a strike was issued, ensuring an 80-day period for further negotiation.

But the controversy at X-10, for its full implications to be gauged, must be viewed in yet another perspective — that of the total Oak Ridge undertaking and the labor-management arrangements extending through it. In addition to X-10, Oak Ridge includes the vast K-25 plant for the separation of uranium 235 by gaseous diffusion and the Y-12 plant for electromagnetic separation.

Carbide & Carbon Chemicals Corporation was retained by the Manhattan Engineer District in 1942 to operate K-25. The corporation’s present contract with the Atomic Energy Commission for the operation of the plant extends to 1951. In May, 1947, Y-12, also, became the operating responsibility of Carbide & Carbon, and in December, 1947, Carbide & Carbon agreed to become the contractor for operation of X-10 from March 1, 1948.

Thus by midspring the three Oak Ridge installations were under the management of the same contractor. The contractor, it should be noted, receives for its managerial and operative efforts a fixed fee which is not affected by subsequent changes in wages paid or in other costs of the operations.

The inequalities in pay

During the war, when security requirements among other factors militated against it, no effort to organize workers in the Oak Ridge installations was made by the American Federation of Labor or the Congress of Industrial Organizations. But in August, 1946, union elections were authorized. About 3000 of the 5400 employees at K-25 elected to join the CIO, which was certified as the bargaining agent by the National Labor Relations Board in September of that year. At Y-12 the vote was for no union. At X-10, with about 2400 employees, some 900 voted for representation by the AFL, which was certified in September. When Carbide & Carbon became operator of all three installations, they included the full gamut of possible union organization.

After the union elections in August, 1946, collective bargaining negotiations got under way, resulting in agreements at K-25 and X-10, which were made public in December, 1946, when the Atomic Energy Commission was in process of taking over responsibility from the Manhattan Engineer District. The AFL X-10 contract not only provided higher wage rates than those existing in the area for comparable work, but also included benefits — vacation, sick leave, insurance, and other provisions — not included in the CIO K-25 contract and not usual in the area.

This discrepancy grew out of the higher wages and better terms of employment which the government had offered in 1943 to induce men to work in the laboratory, in which it was believed they would be subject to radiation hazards of a largely unknown nature. The CIO and the K-25 contractor carried on extended negotiations during 1947 which resulted in an average wage increase of about 13½ cents an hour at K-25.

To label the X-10 problem as simply an aspect of the task of conversion from military operation in time of war to civil operation in time of peace is inaccurate and insufficient. For reasons implicit in the international impasse earlier referred to, the principal work of the United States atomic energy enterprise continues to be the production of weapons; and the urgency surrounding it, though different in kind, is just as important as it was when the original conditions of work were drawn up.

But the mystery has lessened, and the hazard from radiation has been objectively evaluated; thus, per million man-hours worked from January, 1944, to January, 1948, the number of individuals disabled at X-10 was two, at K-25 six, at Y-12 seven. In the chemical industry as a whole over a three-year period, ten individuals were disabled per million man-hours worked. Likewise, the isolation of working units under security had given place to industrial patterns more nearly resembling standard competitive practice, with due weight in the thinking of both management and labor.

The reconciliation

Negotiators for the company and for the union, the board of inquiry of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, and the Commission all realized how much was at stake in this isolated dispute. For example, seeking inclusion in the contract of provision for voluntary arbitration of all disputes, the union renounced recourse to the traditional strike weapon. Its representative at one stage declared: “Recognizing our grave responsibility to the people and to the government of this country, and our equity in this plant, we wrote in our contract a clause called ‘continuity of operation’ which would not permit the union under any circumstances to have a strike, a slow-down, a sloppage of work, or a sympathy strike of any nature whatsoever.”

The company differed with the union’s position, holding that there should be a stated time limit on negotiation, after which discussions on wages must cease. Then, either the workers would have to continue under the existing wage scale or the union could exercise its economic power as it does in any industry and call a strike.

That the company’s position, like the union’s, was based on a lively sense of public responsibility was plain in the company’s reasons for declining to submit certain disputed provisions to arbitration: “The basic wage rates and other working conditions, benefits, and privileges of employees substantially affect the cost of operations. If the company were to agree voluntarily lo relinquish to an arbitrator the determination of these basic cost factors, it would constitute a serious impairment of management’s control over economical and efficient operation.”

Goverment refuses to interfere

The Atomic Energy Commission, urged by the union to intervene and require settlement of the dispute through arbitration, stood by its hardthought policy that the long-range public interest demands the full integration of the growing atomic energy industry into the broad pattern of major American industrial enterprise, and that therefore, for the fostering of initiative and responsibility, there must not be interference with managerial prerogatives when these are properly administered. It declined to go farther than to review the company’s offered contract, which it found not unreasonable or unwarranted.

Significance lies in the fact that agreement was reached, from such opposed points of view; that the union declared against the strike as a matter of public interest; that the company held to its prerogatives, not in order to augment its return (which is fixed) but as a way to economy and efficiency, treating taxpayers’ dollars with the same care as stockholders’ dollars; and that government, in the person of the Commission, avoided action which might serve to involve government in business. Thus heartening progress was made on the task of bringing into being a vast industry based on a government monopoly, but bringing it into being within the framework of collective bargaining and free enterprise.