Press: Guild & Gorilla

Embattled last week on a coast-to-coast picket line, the American Newspaper Guild, in a complaint to the National Labor Relations Board, charged the New York Times with “coercion and interference with the organization of the employes.” In Seattle a drawn-out strike against the Star was stalemated, a new strike against the Bayonne, N. J. Times was met with a drastic injunction forbidding every form of picketing and any attempt to influence other employes. But in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. the Guild won a notable victory as it ended a strike against the Record: effective Jan. 1 all editorial employes of all four Wilkes-Barre papers must hold Guild membership. The Wilkes-Barre settlement strongly contrasted with the Guild’s turbulent campaign against the Brooklyn Eagle, where 300 employes out of 2,300 have been noisily on strike nine weeks. The Eagle, first major New York City paper to be struck by the Guild, has been attacked not only frontally by aggressive picketing, but on the flank by a Guild campaign directed at Eagle advertisers. At Brooklyn’s Abraham & Straus department store a Guild demonstrator in a gorilla suit dashed up and down escalators until women’s wild shrieks brought police. Said the sign on the hairy picket’s back: “I don’t buy my cocoanuts at A & S because they advertise in the Eagle.”