Press: Compromises

Five metropolitan newspapers pacified their restless laborers last week with compromises :

¶ In Portland, Ore., 245 printers on the Oregonian, News-Telegram and Journal went back to work after their five-day strike failed to win them a seven-hour day. The three papers ceased publication, cut local news off four big newspaper-con-trolled radio stations, persuaded neighboring publishers to send in no additional out-of-town papers. Starved for news and surfeited with months of lumber and teamsters’ strikes, Portland had little sympathy for the printers. Portland editorial men, strongly non-Guild, offered no help, so the strikers had little choice but to accept the publishers’ pre-strike offer of $9 for a 7¢-hour day (TIME, Jan. 24).

¶ In Chicago, at five o’clock one tense morning, near the end of a noisy five-hour mass meeting, 350 American Newspaper Guild members from the Hearst Herald & Examiner and American tore up picket signs, canceled a threatened strike, accepted a one-year Guild contract offered by nervous little Herald & Examiner Publisher Emanuel (“Manny”) Levi, who also took over the American fortnight ago. The contract provides that no pay cuts or discharges can be made in any department for three months, after that only through arbitration. No editorial salaries can be lowered for one year, but neither can the editorial men strike during that period. The 286 men laid off in a Levi economy slash during the past six months must be given preference when any rehiring is done. Though it did not win a closed shop, the Guild, by winning its first Chicago contract, sunk a deep wedge in the stiff-backed opposition from Chicago publishers.