Remarks About the Settlement of the Postal Dispute.

I THOUGHT since this was the first briefing in the new room that I would introduce the briefing team.

We have completed a meeting in the Cabinet Room, as you know, with the representatives of the postal unions and with representatives of Government, the Postmaster General and the Secretary of Labor representing the Government-wide unions, and also George Meany [President, AFL-CIO], whose intercession was very helpful in working out the settlement.

This is different, as you all know, from the usual labor-management settlement, because in the usual labor-management settlement, when labor and management make a deal, then the contract is signed, and that is it. Here there is a third party. The third party is the Congress. As I informed the participants in the meeting today, it was now necessary for us to join together in a program to get congressional support for the various proposals that were agreed to by the parties earlier today.

I will be sending a message to the Congress tomorrow on this subject, and John Ehrlichman will brief you on what the general outlines of that message will be, not on the specifics. The message, I think, should be ready by about 10:00 tomorrow.

So , Mr. Ehrlichman now can brief you on any of the meeting that you would like, and also the principles that I laid out at the meeting as to the responsibilities of Government, where Government employees do come back to work--the responsibility of Government to negotiate a fair settlement.