Throughout the prolonged steel strike of 1959, R(ichard) Conrad Cooper held the key position of chairman of the steel industry's four-man team which negotiated with labor representatives headed by David J. McDonald, president of the United Steelworkers of America. Originally trained as an industrial engineer, Cooper had risen gradually from field work in his profession to the office of executive vice-president in charge of personnel services for the United States Steel Corporation. He had been appointed to that position in February1958. As a specialist in industrial relations, he built his reputation on achievements in the areas of job classification and wage incentives within the steel industry. Business Week magazine once called R. Conrad Cooper the "dean of labor talks" because of his tough bargaining manner when he sat across the table from such labor leaders as John L. Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers of America and Philip Murray, David J. McDonald and I.W. Abel, past presidents of the United Steelworkers of America. He negotiated the low-cost steel contracts of 1962 and 1963. Richard Conrad Cooper, the fifth of eight children of Edwin Peter and Stella (Taylor) Cooper, was born in Beaver Dam, Kentucky on June 15, 1903. When R. Conrad was four years of age, his father gave up his work as a coal miner and small-shaft operator in Beaver Dam, moved his family north to South Dakota by covered wagon, and became a "homesteader" on a farm near Pierre. Here Cooper grew up and received most of his early education. Cooper had fifteen dollars in his pocket upon arrival at Minneapolis in 1922 to study engineering at the University of Minnesota. Cooper pumped gasoline, waited on tables in a fraternity house, worked in a restaurant, and worked as an usher in a movie theater, yet he was able to find time for sports while he was studying for his degree. He played center on the college football team. He was also a member of the 1924 team that held Illinois' celebrated Red Grange to minus yardage. R. Conrad Cooper won the heavyweight boxing championship at Minnesota and tried his hand at rodeo rough riding while earning his undergraduate degree. (Later, as a negotiator for the Wheeling Steel Corporation, he called John L. Lewis "a windbag" and quickly accepted Lewis's invitation to fight. However, the match never occurred.) He graduated with the B.S. degree in 1926. He remained in Minneapolis and accepted a position as field engineer in the service department of the Universal Portland Cement Company. n 1929, Cooper married his college sweetheart, Irene Virginia Johnson, and in the same year joined a New York City management consultant firm, the Charles E. Bedaux Company - now called American Associated Consultants. The Charles E. Bedaux Company specialized in installing the Bedaux System For various companies. Fortune (March 1959) described the Bedaux System as "an efficiency engineering program that was long denounced by U.S. labor as 'the speedup system'." he Wheeling (West Virginia) Steel Corporation hired Cooper in 1937 as assistant to its vice-president in charge of operations. The United States War Labor Board directed the steel industry to setup a system of standard job classifications and wages in 1944. Cooper accepted an assignment from the United States Steel Corporation of Delaware to head its negotiating committee in working out an agreement with the United Steelworkers. As U.S. Steel's assistant vice-president for industrial relations, he negotiated with the union from 1945 to 1947, in order to reach a settlement on job classification. During the next decade, R. Conrad Cooper's career was steadily advanced within the U.S. Steel corporate network. Cooper was vice-president in charge of industrial engineering from 1948 to 1955. He was vice-president for administrative planning from 1955 to 1958. He became the executive vice-president for personnel services for the U.S. Steel Corporation, in 1958. As Cooper's corporate career moved forward, he tried to persuade the steelworker union to agree to a plan based on his estimates of a "fair day's work." During several years of drawn out negotiations, union spokesmen charged Cooper with advocating the speedup, according to Fortune (March 1959). A settlement in 1952 resulted in a compromise which allowed the union to retain the right to challenge incentive rates established by management. The U.S. Steel Corporation had for some years provided leadership for management in settling disputes with the steelworkers' union. Cooper, therefore, was recognized early in 1959 as the man who would be the principal industry negotiator with labor representatives in the collective bargaining due to begin before the contract expired at the end of June 1959. When formal talks opened between the two groups in New York in May, Cooper headed a four-man team representing twelve steel companies - all major producers accounting for approximately 87% of the nation's steel. From the beginning of the negotiations, Cooper denounced the steelworkers' wage demands as inflationary, contending that an increase in the price of steel would be necessary to offset the wage raise. He argued that such a price increase would make it more difficult for U.S. steel producers to withstand the encroachments of foreign steel competitors, and that American steel would price itself out of world markets. Labor, on the other hand, attributed industry's predicament to its own high profits. Another important issue in the dispute concerned local work rules. Industry insisted upon gaining greater authority over working practices at the plant level in order to eliminate what Cooper called "loafing, featherbedding, and unjustifiable idle time." Industry negotiators stipulated that union agreement to work-rule changes would have to be a precondition to any specific offer of a wage increase. Eight weeks of negotiations failed to break the deadlock between management and labor. A strike date was set for June 30, 1959. However, it was postponed through a two-week truce arranged by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. On July 15th, the steelworkers called a nationwide walkout. The walkout of July 15, 1959 initiated the longest work stoppage in the history of the steel industry. At the time the strike had reached its 116th day, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Taft-Hartley law injunction directing the steelworkers to return to work for eighty days. By this time, thousands of other workers in various industries had been thrown out of work because of steel shortages. The U.S. Steel Corporation had announced in October that during the strike-ridden third quarter of 1959 it had suffered a loss of more than thirty-one million dollars. Nevertheless, it was able to maintain its quarterly dividend of seventy-five cents because of heavy profits in the first half of the year - profits due, in part, to consumers' having built up a reserve of inventories in expectation of a strike. Although Cooper "struck out" (as one steel executive and colleague stated), during the 1959 management- labor negotiations, he successfully negotiated the low-cost 1962 and 1963 contracts. Because of his high public profile during periods of negotiations between the steel companies and the United Steelworkers, R. Conrad Cooper was known to several American presidents, namely Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Cooper retired from the U.S. Steel Corporation on June 30, 1968. Upon retirement, Cooper remained very active, both professionally and civically. He formed a partnership with Richard Faulkner Sentner (another then recently retired executive vice-president of the U.S. Steel Corporation) to establish a business consulting firm, the Cooper-Sentner Company. After Sentner died in 1975, Cooper operated the business on his own until 1980. He also served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Sewickley Valley Hospital, President of the Airline Industrial Relations Conference and as a trustee for Grove City College. R. Conrad Cooper died at Sewickley Valley Hospital on October 1, 1982, as a result of a lengthy illness. His wife, Irene, followed him in death three months later, on December 29, 1982. The Coopers had no children.
From the description of Papers of R. Conrad Cooper, 1927-1980 (bulk: 1950-1970). (University of Pittsburgh).
