Newspapers: End Without an End

The three-week strike was officially over, and all New York City newspapers were publishing again. It was an uneasy and precarious peace. The Newspaper Guild’s Tom Murphy seemed to he threatening yet another walkout: “If the World-Telegram and Journal-American were to merge,” said he, speaking of an event the industry expects, “I could put a picket line out, and they wouldn’t publish as individual papers, let alone as a merged paper.” Printers’ Boss Bert Powers was reminding everyone that he has not given an inch in his demands. Any new contracts, said Powers, must give his men a hefty share of savings from any automation in newspaper plants. What percent of savings? “Right up to the margin of impossibility.”

Little had really changed since the end of the Printers’ disastrous strike two years ago. After that one, Abe Raskin of the New York Times Editorial Board wrote a long, lucid account of the strike in which he took both publishers and unions to task for their crammed and churlish attitude toward each other. In the Times last week, as well as in the Reporter, Raskin gave a repeat performance—chastising his own employers as well as the unions.

No Ordinary Business. “Each side,” said Raskin, “convinced of its own eternal rectitude, sees the other with the grotesque distortions of a fun-house mirror.” To make matters worse “defections and internal feuds have riddled the centra] organizations on which both sides once relied to promote industrial stability.” Though they had talked over the issues for a full six months before the strike, neither the Times nor the Guild was prepared for serious collective bargaining. On the crucial question of the Times’s pension plan, the “Guild did not bring in either an actuary or a program until after the strike, but neither did the Times meet the Guild’s full-information request until after Ted Kheel urged it to do so. The mediator told both sides that he was ‘shocked’ at their unpreparedness.”

Behind all the criticism showered on publishers and unions alike was the realization that newspapers are not an ordinary everyday business. They are, in effect, a public utility; to shut them down, whoever is responsible, can be as damaging to a city as turning off its electric power. Echoing a general dissatisfaction with the fact that the Times and the Guild were unable to negotiate productively, Arthur Goldberg, Ambassador to the United Nations, said that compulsory arbitration was the most promising answer. The hostility of both publishers and unions to any type of compulsory arbitration makes even that proposal questionable.

Columnist Max Lerner, writing in the New York Post, wanted a “compulsory breather” of 30 days once a strike date has arrived. During the breather, mediators would review the facts and make recommendations that would be widely publicized, since the papers would still be publishing. “We often act,” said Lerner, “as if the alternatives were all or nothing: compulsory arbitration or do-nothingism. There is a healthy ground between them: the use of limited legal powers to dramatize the conflict areas, publicize the facts and solutions, put the two sides on the spot and build up opinion behind a settlement.”

Sworn to Resist. At present, all solutions to New York’s newspaper battles seem very distant. The publishers remain hopelessly split in their thinking; during negotiations they could scarcely agree even on routine matters. The ten craft unions are also snarling at one another. The skilled unions—Printers, Photoen-gravers, Machinists—are beginning to balk at across-the-board wage increases; they want percentage increases that would bring them more money. The unskilled—Mailers, Deliverers, Paper Handlers—on the other hand, want to stick to flat-sum increases, which, at their lower pay rates, would mean more money to them.

Murphy and Powers both agree that the unions must get together and hammer out common bargaining positions. Powers is about to propose a council of the craft unions that will have a veto vote on strikes; if a majority disapproves, a member union will not be able to strike. Yet even as he makes such conciliatory suggestions, Powers is stepping up his demands. What he wants now is a guarantee from each of the papers that it will take on employees displaced by other papers because of merger or automation. The publishers have sworn to resist. “Labor and management,” said Raskin, “can prolong their quarreling until the cake over which they quarrel crumbles into nothing.”