Newspapers: Another Blackout in New York

The New York Times — if you’re without it, you’re not with it.

—New York City subway advertisement

Last week some 730,000 regular Times readers were not with it. But not by choice. For the first time in its 32-year history the New York Newspaper Guild had struck the Times, and the paper was not publishing.

Neither was most of the competition. When the nine other newspaper unions refused to cross the Guild picket line, the papers belonging to the New York Publishers Association—the Her-a’d Tribune, Daily News, Journal-American, World-Telegram, Long Island Daily Press and Star-Journal—shut down too. Of the city’s major dailies, only the New York Post, which does not belong to the association, was still on newsstands—a situation that served as an ominous reminder of 1962’s 114-day newspaper strike, which crippled the city’s papers and helped send one of them, the Daily Mirror, to its death.

Demand for a Veto. As soon as the Guild struck, Mayor Wagner summoned home his troubleshooting labor mediator, Ted Kheel, from a Copenhagen conference on automation, which is, ironically, the key issue in the New York dispute. Kheel closeted himself with the negotiators, and the group stayed in session from 7 in the evening until 8 the next morning. Two hours later, they reconvened and kept at it until 1 the following morning, when a haggard, pallid Kheel announced: “With the benefit of sleep and reflection, we will be able to move forward.” His optimism was well meant, but Kheel and company are concerned with an issue that promises no swift solution.

At the heart of the Times-Guild dispute is the thorny question of how to protect jobs when new machines can do them more efficiently and more cheaply. When the publishers bargained with the New York Typographical Union last spring, they agreed to give the printers a veto over the installation of any new automation equipment, a decision they have already come to regret. For now the Guild is demanding equal treatment.

Fearful that jobs connected with new machinery will be given to the more powerful printers, the Guild wants much the same veto power as the I.T.U. “We believe that if the company is under the pressure of one union,” says Guild Executive Vice President Tom Murphy, “the other union is going to be left out in the cold. We don’t want to be treated like second-class citizens.”

Worried by well-founded rumors of an imminent merger of the World-Telegram and Journal-American that might put 600 Guild members out of work, Murphy also wants a pledge from the Times that it will hire some of his displaced Guildsmen. And he wants management to guarantee that no Guildsman will lose his job except by attrition: by quitting or retiring. The Times has given such a guarantee to the I.T.U., but is willing to give it only to those Guild members hired as full-time employees before March 31, 1965, the date of expiration of the last contract. Finally, two lesser issues are also in dispute. With 2,200 out of 2,400 eligible employees already on its rolls, the Guild is demanding a union shop—something the Times management is determined not to have. The Guild is also unhappy with the Times’s pension plan and is asking for severance pay for retiring employees.

Lead-Pipe Bargaining. Until the last moment, there had been a reasonable doubt that the city’s other papers would close down in support of the Times. All the papers of the Publishers Association shut down in 1962, but that was because the I.T.U. negotiated its contract with the association as a whole. Alone among the unions, the Guild negotiates individually with each paper. For the moment, at least, it is only fighting with the Times, and last week the Printing Pressmen’s union filed suit to enjoin the other publishers from stopping their presses. But a court decision was postponed in the legal wrangle.

The craft unions, however, are sure to be heard from further. Only three of the nine have yet signed contracts with the Publishers Association, and any settlement satisfactory to the Guild might well trigger another round of negotiations for the newspapers, most of which can scarcely afford any more concessions. Last week the mailers flexed their muscles by refusing to send enough men to handle deliveries at two papers. “I am shocked that the orderly processes of collective bargaining are being interfered with by these damaging actions,” said Publishers Association President John J. Gaherin. “This is bargaining with a piece of lead pipe rolled up in a newspaper.”

By week’s end, the bargaining between the Guild and the Times was still going on. None of the participants were predicting a quick settlement, but neither were they suggesting a deadlock. No matter what the outcome of the strike, it will hardly begin to unravel the problems of the New York newspaper industry, a complex of highly individualistic newspapers and unions. The newspapers, most of which are losing money, are often as wary of one another as they are of the unions. And the unions are squabbling for survival in a shrinking job market. It will take some long-range planning for them all to make peace.