Cyrus S. Ching: pioneer in industrial peacemaking; as a manager, and later as a government executive, Ching pointed the way to a cooperative system of labor relations by showing that differences are much more easily resolved when reason, rather than rancor, prevails

Monthly Labor Review, August, 1989 by A.H. Raskin

Unimpressed by this notice, the board adjourned without making a decision on the pay hike. Ching tracked down his boss, Matthew Brush, after the meeting and warned him that the company was making a "horrible mistake." The company president summoned all his top executives to a strategy session the next morning, during which Brush assured Ching that he would back him in any measures necessary to avert a strike. However, he accompanied that assurance with an unequivocal declaration that there was no way to reconvene the company board before the union's scheduled meeting that evening.

Ching had no choice but to invite the officials who would preside at the union session to meet with him an hour before the opening discussion by the union members on whether to strike or stay at work. He admitted to them that he felt terribly let down, but that he must have more time to get the company's OK on the 2-cent increase. The union's international vice president, the ranking labor official at the conference with Ching, did not waste time reproaching the board of directors for their failure to bite the bullet. Instead, with the union's 7 o'clock opening session only a few minutes away, he put through a call from Ching's office to the superintendent of the union meeting hall.

He told the superintendent to station his assistant at the hall's main lighting switch and to go himself to the platform and inform those at the meeting that the union's international officers were still in negotiations with the company and could not come to the session. Immediately on that announcement, the assistant superintendent was to pull the switch and plunge the hall into total darkness, so that no rump meeting could be held by militants bent on fomenting a walkout.

The strategy worked beautifully, and the next morning all the employees reported for work. But Ching felt he owed it to his saviors in the upper echelon of the international union not to let the board of directors off too lightly for their dereliction. He told Brush and the board that they had bought time but that they would have to pay for it. What would now be needed to prevent a strike, he said, would be a 4-cent hourly raise, double the amount that would have been required if the company had honored the original timetable. Privately, Ching had no doubt that the union rank and file would ratify a contract calling for a 3-cent boost, but he wanted to teach the board a lesson in the costs of management obtuseness. The board approved the 4-cent figure and the union could exult in a victory.

That experience made Ching a strong believer throughout his career in involving the parent union directly in negotiations when a fractions local leadership or rank and file appeared eager to shut a company down before efforts at peaceful resolution of disputes had been exhausted. "One reason I get along with people so well," he said in an amplification of his philosophy, "is that I like people. I like people en masse and I like people as individuals." The rapport he established with the multiple unions on the Boston El was so pervasive that, even though all but two unions had a contractual right to arbitration of unresolved grievances, only two cases went that route and both involved unions not covered by the arbitration clause as a matter of right.