The Press: Trick Play

When the Taft-Hartley Act banned the closed shop from union contracts, the International Typographical Union figured out a simple dodge. The printers refused to renew their contracts, but insisted that publishers agree instead to informal “conditions of employment” which actually kept the closed shop in operation. Many newspapers agreed; the Chicago publishers refused, and the I.T.U. struck. To test the legality of the printers’ policy, the American Newspaper Publishers Association and the Chicago Newspaper Publishers Association filed separate suits against the I.T.U. before the National Labor Relations Board. Last week, six weeks after the Chicago publishers had won the strike (TIME, Sept. 26), the NLRB unanimously ruled that the “conditions of employment” were illegal. They were, said the board, a “bargaining strategy… to effect the exclusion of non-union men, squarely in conflict with the [Taft-Hartley] Act.” The board ordered the union to stop discriminating against non-union men, and bargain in good faith.