The Press: New York Goes Modern

An elderly printer stood in a packed Manhattan hall last week and regaled his colleagues with an off-key rendition of After You’ve Gone. The performance was a bittersweet joke, for members of New York’s Typographical Union No. 6 were voting, with white marbles or black, on aninnovative eleven-year contract that will radically shrink one of the nation’s oldest and most powerful craft union locals. The white marbles outnumbered the black by an overwhelming 1,009 to 41, thus giving the New York Times and the Daily News the right to fully automate their production systems. In return, the 1,400 regular and 385 part-time printers at the Times and the Daily News will receive lifetime job security and some seductive incentives to retire.

The deal had historic resonance. “Big Six” is a local founded by Horace Greeley in 1850. It became a prototype of traditional craft unionism in which membership was passed from father to son, and rigid rules protecting jobs were written into contracts.

Thrown Away. The printers’ outmoded skills are rooted in the 19th century. Under the traditional system, after reporters’ stories are typed and edited, they are sent to the composing room. Using the keyboard on Linotype machines (first introduced in 1886), printers slowly retype the copy while the Linotypes disgorge slugs of hot metal bearing single lines of even or “justified” type. Masses of these slugs make up columns of type and are inserted into page forms; plates made from completed forms are eventually put on the presses.

This process is inefficient enough. But it is made more so by featherbedding techniques that Big Six (and locals elsewhere) adopted over the years. The most garish of these is called “bogus” or “dead horse”—in which printers are allowed to set up duplicates of display ads that their papers have received ready to print. These duplicates are methodically processed—and then thrown away. The New York local also enforced contract rules forbidding employers to transfer printers from one kind of composing room task to another; thus Linotypists might sit idly while work piled up on proofreaders. Printers also clung to “manning” rules’, in which the union and not management determined the number of men required by their machines.

During the past decade, remarkable technological advances were made at papers where unions are weak or nonexistent. Machines were developed that could translate an edited story photographically into justified columns of print, without the intercession of printers, hot metal or ink. These new “cold type” procedures are dramatically faster; a photocomposing machine can spew out 150 lines a minute, compared to three lines a minute for a man and a Linotype. At a number of papers like the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Times-Herald, Miami Herald and Detroit News (TIME, Dec. 17), the technology is dazzling. Reporters compose their stories on keyboards attached to a computer and a small video screen—a sort of electronic “page.” Editors call up the finished stories on their own screens, on which they can do their editing, and transfer final versions back into the computer. From there the story is run through a cold type machine and ultimately installed on computer-controlled printing presses.

Since such modern equipment requires fewer and less skilled operators, it offers publishers great economies. Small wonder, then, that 1,050 of the nation’s 1,774 dailies now employ some form of automated printing. As a rule, full-time printers have not been fired; some have been retrained, and the work forces have diminished by attrition.

For years New York publishers argued that they could not retain antiquated methods when faster and cheaper ones were available. Just as adamantly, Bertram A. Powers, president of Big Six, refused to allow the introduction of innovations that would replace his members. Attrition agreements worked out elsewhere did not satisfy him, and he demanded protection for part-time workers. The printers’ last contract expired in March 1973; Powers and the publishers haggled over a new one for 15 months.

But Powers was fighting a long holding action against the inevitable, and his strength steadily eroded. The Times and News purchased automated equipment and set up a training center for nonunion personnel in New Jersey. Last spring Powers launched a series of work slowdowns at the News; as the size of the daily paper shrank and advertising losses mounted, management installed its new equipment and threatened to use it if the printers did not resume normal schedules. When the deadline for compliance passed, the new machinery (manned by office help) was rushed into use, and Powers took his men out of the building. But other unions failed to support the printers, and the News continued to appear each day, while its printers stood on the sidewalk outside.

New Pattern. It was finally time to compromise, and the generous terms established in New York may set a pattern for a few other cities where old methods are still in use. In exchange for allowing automation and abandoning featherbedding, no printer presently employed will be dismissed, even if there is no work at all for him to do. In addition to immediate raises of about $40 a week, yearly 3% salary hikes plus cost of living increments, members of Local 6 (average age: 56) will receive a $2,500 bonus if they retire during the next six months. As an added enticement, retiring printers can exchange a guaranteed six-month leave for a half-year’s pay plus the bonus, giving them a lump settlement of around $10,000.

The settlement could have special impact on two pending negotiations. On July 11, the Washington Post offered to buy 40,000 pages of bogus material from its printers; the price of $2.6 million would be divided among the paper’s 686 printers in terms of a 4½-year contract, including eleven weeks of paid leave. For this, the Post asked the printers to permit unlimited automation and give up bogus. The union has yet to respond. At the Chicago Tribune, where contract talks with the printers should begin this fall, it is understood that both parties will be influenced by the settlement reached in New York.

The changeover to automation in New York will begin slowly. The Times admits that its composing room is ten years behind some other U.S. papers. But, adds Operations Officer John Werner, “it won’t take ten years to recover.” After some lean years, both papers look forward to the added profits that automation may bring. The Times has specific reasons to hope. In the first six months of this year, its string of eleven automated papers in Florida and North Carolina showed pretax profit margins averaging 26.6%, while the nonautomated Times itself returned only 6.2%.