The Press: After the Crusade

During the big Depression of the 1930s, Cleveland Press reporters took one 15% pay slash, then two more of 10% each. The National Recovery Administration limited the work week to 40 hours, but newsmen were left out. Instead, reporters got a 16-point “firing code” that let its authors, the American Newspaper Publishers Association, fire a man for swearing or wasting copy paper. A survey by the infant American Newspaper Guild revealed that a reporter with 20 years’ experience was paid an average $38 a week, about half what the unionized printers got, and Alex Crosby, news editor and sole Guild member on the Staten Island Advance, bravely but naively staged a one-man strike.

Last week in New York’s Astor Hotel, 275 delegates to the Guild’s 26th annual convention gathered to measure improvements in the reporter’s lot since those unorganized and impoverished days. By bread-and-butter standards, the improvements are impressive. Now 30,857 strong (about half editorial, half other categories), the Guild guarantees today’s journeyman reporter a good minimum wage—$157.10 a week on the New York Daily News, $136 on the Los Angeles Herald-Express, $105 on the Indianapolis Times. And his security is as thoroughly bolted as any blue-collar compositor’s. Typically, he gets severance pay, three weeks’ paid vacation a year, paid sick leave, a pension, a 40-hour week or less, and the contractual right to arbitrate his grievances with the boss.

On to the C.I.O. Born in 1933 on a wave of city-room salary slashes, the Guild was nursed through infancy by its fat and rumpled creator, the late famed Scripps-Howard columnist, Heywood Broun. It took plenty of nursing. Fledgling chapters had a distressing tendency to melt under pressure: during a 1935 strike against the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Guild membership on the 84-man news staff dwindled from 39 to 24. At first the newsmen resisted joining a national labor movement sponsored by common laborers, but within four years the Guild affiliated with John L. Lewis’ new Committee for Industrial Organization, welcomed office boys, clerks, janitors, elevator operators, commercial-and advertising-department help.

The move put an end to the Guild as a craft union of working newsmen, but it did provide some desperately needed muscle. In 1937 it boldly engineered nine strikes, called twelve more in 1938. It wrote its first national contract (with the United Press) in 1938, and by 1941 had pushed membership past 16,000. It also ended one of the sorriest chapters in Guild history: domination by Communist sympathizers. Attracted by the Guild’s obvious potential, Red-liners moved in soon after its formation, eventually controlled the national offices. After a bitter fight in 1941, anti-Communists forced through a national referendum that swept out the leftist administration by a 2-1 vote.

The Pains of Success. In some respects, success has proved more unsettling than growing pains. Triumphant in its drive for wages, the Guild today is a crusader lacking a crusade. Membership tends to be listless: last year the Portland (Ore.) local lowered its attendance quorum to 10% to get legislation out of indefinite hock. In the last twelve years the Guild has added only 6,560 new members, has made little or no effort to plaster the gaping holes in its ranks, e.g., such traditional holdouts as the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal, the Detroit News, the Kansas City (Mo.) Star, the Philadelphia Bulletin and the Omaha World-Herald. “We won’t come through Omaha,” says Guild Executive Vice President William J. Farson, “until someone asks us.” Of some 1,750 U.S. dailies, the Guild has contracts with only 176, is so unambitious an explorer of virgin territory that organizing new locals is last on its priority list. First: recruiting 5,000 “free riders,” or non-dues-paying newspaper employees, already covered by Guild contracts.

At the Astor last week, conventioneers nominated New York Post Librarian Arthur Rosenstock, 56, to replace outgoing International President Joseph F. Collis, assistant managing editor of the Wilkes-Barre (Pa.) Record, reset their sights on a membership goal of 50,000, a minimum wage of $200 for experienced newsmen, and listened to a barrage of speeches by outside labor leaders, including one by Francis G. Barrett, New York local president of the International Typographical Union, urging one big union for all newspaper employees—editorial, mechanical, printing, etc. But hardly a word was heard about perfecting the reporter’s craft, a function in which the American Newspaper Guild, its constitution notwithstanding, has in a quarter-century betrayed no sustaining interest.