Before the Senate labor-management investigating committee, the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co.'s top labor expert, Charles A. Schimmat, last week reluctantly told a small and ugly story. In 1952, when the C.I.O. Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union was signing up New York area supermarket employees in a successful drive for a 40-hour work week,* Schimmat cooked up a plan for keeping 16,000 clerks in 700 A. & P. stores working on the same old 45-hour week.
The plan: instead of negotiating with the aggressive C.I.O. group, he would make a deal with the A.F.L. Amalgamated
Meat Cutters Union, which...
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