**Date:** 6-22-67
**Source:** Unknown
—
To Stop Production
Union Seeking Restraining
Order Against UniRoyal
Federal Mediation
In Rubber Strike
Begins Today
PITTSBURGH (UPI) — In an effort to end the longest strike in rubber industry history, the federal government summoned negotiators for the nation’s top five producers and the United Rubber Workers (URW) for a joint bargaining session. Employees of UniRoyal, Inc., B. F. Goodrich and Firestone Tire & Rubber Co. walked out 63 days ago when their old contract expired.
The URW struck General Tire & Rubber Co. plants in Akron, Ohio, and Waco, Tex., last indicted to bring to $4,000 the number of workers on strike across the nation.
Operations at Goodyear tire plants continued on a day-today basis.
Firestone and General negotiators had been meeting in Cleveland, Goodyear and UniRoyal in Cincinnati, and Goodrich in Columbus, Ohio, until William E. Simkin, chief of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service, asked all tire groups to meet here.
The first session was scheduled to get underway at 4 p.m. in the Penn Sheraton Hotel.
The issues blocking a settlement included wage hikes, supplemental unemployment bene fits, wage differentials between “tire” and “non-tire” employees and the length of the contract.
All the companies except General offered the URW wage hikes of 38 cents an hour for tire employees and 31 cents for “non-fire” employees offered a 40-cent an hour hike and supplemental unemployment benefits totaling 80 per cent of the workers’ wage.
Supplemental Benefits
The union also sought supplemental benefits of 95 per cent. The companies claimed the union demand amounted to a “guaranteed annual wage.”
URW President Peter Bommarito, also asked that the “non-tire” workers receive the same wage hikes as other employees. Tire employes averaged $3.68 cents an hour under the old contract and other workers, $2.69.
For the first time, the URW and the companies bargained about wages and pension and welfare benefits at the same time. In the past, the URW has signed a two-year wage agreement and a three-year welfare proposal. The current welfare agreement does not expire until September.
The companies claim their offer of wages and fringe benefits will cost them 70 cents per each man hour. Bommarito put the cost at only 60 cents an hour.
The lengthy strike, which on Sunday passed the 55-day record set against Firestone in 1959, has drained the URW treasury. Strike benefits were cut from $35 to $15 a week last week. Bommarito was understood to have turned down a loan offer from the United Auto Workers.
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Israel Willing
Internationalize
Jerusalem Parts
By BRUCE W. MUNN
United Press International
UNITED NATIONS (UPI) — Latin American diplomats said Israel’s Foreign Minister Abba S. Eban told them today Israel is willing to internationalize the holy places in Jerusalem.
The statement, made to a private meeting of the Latin American countries, was the first indication of Israel’s willingness to relinquish authority over any part of the Old City of Jerusalem it seized from Jordan.
The report came just before the General Assembly went into its fourth day of debate on the crisis. French Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville was expected to expand on President Charles de Gaulle’s charge Wednesday that Israel started the war and that the war was an outgrowth of U.S. intervention in Vietnam.
Smaller nations were attempting to arrange a compromise between the U.S. and Soviet proposals on the Middle East but diplomatic sources said they had made little progress.