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To make clear that he was no longer an employee of organized labor, Goldberg renounced all rights to a Steelworkers' pension, which would have paid him $25,000 a year beginning at the age of 60, and said he would never again practice labor law, which had provided him with an income of $100,000 a year.
No Strike, No Lockout. Even before he was installed in office, Goldberg had begun gathering facts about a tugboat and railroad strike that was tying up New York and was threatening to spread south and west. Right after his swearing-in ceremony, he got Kennedy's permission to intervene. He was at the bargaining table the next afternoon, and by 6 o'clock the following morning, after 14 straight hours of negotiation, he had stopped the strike by guaranteeing to both parties that the key issue of job security would be kept open and resolved in a year on the basis of a federal study already under way.
One month later, Goldberg intervened in the most costly airline strike in U.S. history, brought about settlement of a wildcat walkout of flight engineers by setting up a reviewing board of three professors. In May, Goldberg scored his most substantive single triumph. Hard on the heels of a Senate investigation into the scandalous work stoppages in missile-site construction, he got a no-strike, no-lockout commitment from labor and management, set up an arbitration committee to decide on differences while work went on. In 1960, walkouts cost the U.S. 86,000 man-days of work on its missile sites. Goldberg's formula has slashed the rate to around 200 man-days a month. Just as he did last week at Lowry A.F.B., Goldberg ruthlessly holds labor as well as management to its no-strike, no-lockout agreement. Says he: "We are not going to have shutdowns in missile-site construction."
Last month, at the request of President Kennedy, Goldberg intervened in the complex, personality-ridden battle between the musicians and management of the Metropolitan Opera that had led General Manager Rudolf Bing to throw up his hands and cancel the 1961-62 season. Both sides agreed to go on with the season and leave their differences up to an arbitrator—but only if the arbitrator was Goldberg.
If he is to continue participating in such personal ways in the nation's labor-management disputes, Goldberg is going to be a terribly busy man. That prospect is one that he faces with pleasure. He is an activist who rises at 6:30 each morning, takes a walk around his fashionable Northwest Washington neighborhood, breakfasts with Wife Dorothy, and is at his Labor Department desk by at least 9 o'clock. He still gets a real kick out of the prestige and privileges of his office. Says a Cabinet colleague: "Arthur is just as thrilled as he can be about being Secretary of Labor. This has not become old stuff to him."
But Goldberg also recognizes the immensity of labor's problems. He makes no bones about the fact that Jimmy Hoffa is a menace to the labor movement. But he is "confident that Hoffa will eventually be repudiated by his own members." Goldberg insists that unions must accept automation as a fact of life, but he also insists that management must help retrain workers who have been displaced by automation so that they can become useful members of the new la bor force.