THE NEW YORK NEWSPAPER STRIKE
Ross, Irwin
The New York Newspaper Strike by IRWIN ROSS When New York City's marathon newspaper strike began at 2 a.m. last December 8, the town took it in stride. A newspaper strike was hardly a rarity in...
...when he put pen to paper, he had a precise idea of what they would accept...
...This hardly seems likely in the foreseeable future, though some consolidation is possible...
...Its members have great pride of craft and pride of status...
...IRWIN ROSS has been writing magazine articles for more than two decades...
...Instead of trying it, Secretary of Labor Wirtz flitted in and out of the dispute, risking the prestige of his office, to a degree, but not entirely committing it either...
...Primarily, one gathers, because in the past decade the publishers had shown a dismaying ability to take short strikes without retreating an inch...
...On the evening of March 31, the first editions of the following morning's papers finally appeared...
...It was much less for The Post and The Mirror, which furloughed all but a handful of employes, than for The Times and The Tribune, which maintained relatively large staffs...
...The answers are worth exploring, now that the strike can be seen in perspective, for a collapse of this magnitude in New York is obviously of more than parochial concern...
...See Office Memo, inside front cover...
...It was a strategy foredoomed to failure...
...they were forever hoping for some dens ex machina to retrieve the situation for them...
...President John F. Kennedy went so far as to denounce the strike leader, Bertram A. Powers, by name...
...Powers is a brilliant leader and a shrewd strategist...
...The publishers feared that whatever they gave Powers would later be demanded by the other unions, and that the total price would be far more than they could afford to pay...
...Powers was asking that Local 6's thirty-six and a quarter hour week be reduced to thirty-five hours, with no reduction in the weekly wage...
...Local 6 also had acquired a militant new leader in Bertram Powers, who had been elected president in May, 1961...
...For the same reason, he was reluctant before the strike to inform the publishers privately of what he was really seeking, fearing that word would get back to the other unions and he would be blocked before he could have his test of strength...
...The major problem was a reduction in hours, which blocked progress for weeks after Powers had cut his demands to a $13.67 package and the publishers had raised their offer to $11.04...
...They could hardly afford to do so, however, unless their powerful competitors—The Times and The News, respectively—also raised prices...
...The International Typographical Union, founded in 1850, is the oldest union in the country...
...Powers was resolved not to repeat these debacles...
...His position was that he was waiting for a reasonable offer from the publishers...
...Cynical observers suggest, however, that the sacrificed wash-up time will slowly be reacquired by the typographers, with the result that the reduced hours will cost the publishers about $5 per man per week in overtime...
...Clearly, he was bent on a strike...
...He was presented as a cold, ruthless opportunist with a fanatic belief in union "muscle" who was demanding an extortionate sum—$38 a week in wage increases and fringe benefits—a package which the publishers, who were offering $9.20 a week, obviously could not afford to pay...
...Secretary of Labor W. Willard Wirtz vainly intervened...
...The mobilization of prestigious names such as these—as mediators, not as fact-finders—might possibly have set up channels of communication and eroded the impasse weeks before the ever-patient Mayor Wagner succeeded...
...The incident had the reverse effect, solidifying Powers' position, for it cast him in the role of embattled underdog...
...Moreover, it was highly unlikely that the teamsters would deliver newsprint to the struck plants...
...time anyway and the fifteen minute reduction in each workday could be squeezed out of their "wash-up time" —a non-contractual privilege which amounted to twenty-five or thirty minutes a day on several papers...
...The ITU negotiations, resuming in mid-November, limped through several sessions with no further progress...
...Governor Nelson Rockefeller threatened intervention...
...He sometimes needlessly provoked Powers, who has his own pride...
...The basis of the publishers' assurance was the ITU's past performance...
...The final question, of course, is whether Local 6's triumph was worth the costs to society of a four-month strike...
...By the time he became president of the New York local, even his detractors concede he was the match of any talent the publishers could put up against him...
...He talks in a low-pitched, husky voice, walks with a slight limp that is the result of a boyhood accident...
...Thus, Powers led the fight in the unity committee against the deliverers accepting the publishers' offer...
...On December 5, however, Powers formally reduced his demands to $83...
...Secretary of Labor Wirtz, who would normally have been consulted on such a matter, was on vacation and did not see the statement...
...Despite repeated forewarning, the publishers did not believe that the strike would occur and hence made no strenuous efforts to head it off...
...He apparently believed that if he indicated that his goal was now two or three dollars above the publishers' offer, he would be faced with insistent demands that he settle quickly and get all the men back to work...
...In 1958, the deliverers struck for nineteen days and won nothing beyond the Guild package...
...There still remained two problems: persuading the Newspaper Guild to extend its contracts so as to provide for a common expiration date, and negotiating new contracts with the other unions...
...The local struck four newspapers—the Times, News, Journal-American, and World-Telegram...
...In an effort to find out what Powers really wanted, two publishers' representatives — Amory ?. Bradford, vice president of The Times, and F. M. Flynn, president of The News—had two off-the-record sessions with Powers...
...Orvil E. Dryfoos, the president of The Times, later visited Kheel at his home to persuade him to come back...
...And the union won a victory whose true cost it hardly cared to calculate...
...The Board, in a surprisingly one-sided report, bitterly criticized Local 6 for precipitating a strike without adequate bargaining beforehand...
...Finally, three months after the strike started, Wagner recommended a settlement, which both parties accepted...
...This was obviously only his opening gambit, but the negotiators could not get down to a realistic level...
...strike benefits are taxable, though a majority of strikers overlook the fact...
...his is the kind of suddenly emergent, fresh talent which revives a weary liberal's faith in the self-regenerating capacities of the labor movement...
...In the 1950s, however, the ITU was displaced as the leader among the unions...
...There never was a chance of such an outcome, for in a union with the defensive traditions of the ITU the existence of two strikes was obviously bound to affect the willingness of members to tax themselves...
...It could have been prevented five years ago...
...It was another hollow victory...
...After a brief discussion, the newspapers accepted the Mayor's proposals...
...Towards the end of January, however, the mediators had good reason to doubt that Powers—or at least the international union—had any desire to settle quickly...
...Stephen I. Schlossberg, the Federal mediator, then suggested that the parties "stop the clock" and continue negotiating...
...Hovering over Bert Powers' shoulders were the nine other newspaper unions, only one of which—the Guild—had made a settlement with the publishers prior to the typographers' strike...
...even more irritating was the relative affluence of the truck drivers (again because of overtime) whose skills are minimal...
...So we had one, and it unfortunately ran for 114 days...
...once "aristocrats of labor," they did not take kindly to a leveling process that made them the equal of truck drivers and typists...
...Both sides also made serious strategic errors, with the publishers showing an amazing talent for misreading the facts and miscalculating the opposition's moves...
...there would have been no Guild package to surpass...
...In 1953, the photo-engravers had struck for eight days and were forced to accept the same settlement that they had previously rejected...
...A costly strike would obviously increase the likelihood of a price rise...
...There is no certainty, of course, that this tactic would have worked...
...After December 8, there is only one week of fat pre-Christmas advertising...
...The cost was roughly a dollar less than Powers' last demand, but it gave him a victory on the items of greatest significance: a common expiration date for all the unions' contracts, which would prevent the Newspaper Guild from leading the pack in the future...
...Once the ITU strike began, there was conceivably one mediatory approach which might have shortened it—the early establishment of a high-level mediation board composed of such nationally renowned labor relations experts as David Cole, George Taylor, and Nathan Feinsinger...
...In the end, the publishers won every public relations battle and lost the strike...
...The cost of the strike varied from paper to paper, of course...
...At the age of seventeen, he enrolled in a printing course in Fitch-burg, Massachusetts...
...Once it began, economic conditions were peculiarly conducive to a long trial of strength...
...How was it possible for so dramatic a breakdown in the bargaining dialogue to occur in a city and in an industry so sophisticated about labor-management relations...
...The majority of publishers, however, were overjoyed at President Kennedy's remarks...
...Powers' tactic in striking only four newspapers was perhaps the only time that he scored a public relations advantage...
...A more significant impediment to the negotiations at City Hall was the fact that the dispute with Local 6 could not be viewed in isolation...
...Aren't we entitled to one strike...
...A New Yorker following events on radio or in the skimpy accounts in out-of-town newspapers inevitably got the impression that the strike was a demagogic, irresponsible exercise by a power-mad union president, Bert Powers...
...In that case, of course, the Guild might have struck...
...However insistent the denials, it is not overly cynical to suspect that this aspiration may have been one of the contributory factors in prolonging the strike...
...a thirty-five hour week, in the second year of the contract...
...In the end, The Times and The Tribune did raise their weekday prices from five to ten cents...
...it was the first to gain pensions, paid vacations, and a thirty-six and a quarter-hour week...
...on the other hand, after three months the pressures for a settlement were becoming so strong that there was an evident disposition to take a dictated compromise if the price were not too high...
...The Guild, an odd grab bag of skilled journalists, advertising salesmen, clerks, typists, messengers, and other white collar employes, is the youngest and weakest of the newspaper unions, and is almost entirely dependent for its bargaining power on the willingness of the old-line craft unions to respect its picket lines...
...Nonetheless, the false hopes persisted in some quarters right up to the eve of the balloting...
...The ITU, understandably, was affronted...
...The deliverers decided to accept the publishers' offer, but the unity committee restrained them...
...The Tribune and The Mirror, both large deficit operations, had long been eager to raise their newsstand prices...
...He expected Mrs...
...And beyond all these discontents were vague fears about the number of jobs that might ultimately be eliminated through "automation...
...The publishers, for one thing, were woefully unrealistic in their strategy...
...Theodore Kheel, the brilliant lawyer who served as Mayor Wagner's adviser in the dispute, at one point characterized Powers as a "jitterbug bargainer—he giveth and he taketh away...
...The five other major papers—the Herald Tribune, Mirror, Post, Long Island Star-Journal, and Long Island Press—then ceased publication (the Press suspended in the borough of Queens, part of New York City—but continued its Long Island editions...
...Powers made one major miscalculation of his own...
...The distinction between a strike on four papers and a lockout by the other five was soon forgotten by the public, however...
...Neither side wanted "recommendations," the publishers preferring binding arbitration and the union opposing any government intervention beyond mediation...
...Through a chain of fortuitous circumstances, the American Newspaper Guild acquired the earliest contract expiration date of all the unions...
...Was there ever any chance of preventing it...
...The deadlock persisted...
...The language of Mayor Wagner's proposal neatly finessed all the major dilemmas...
...Moreover, the ITU had much the best contract, because of its victory on hours...
...The union paid strike benefits ranging from about $68 to $98 a week...
...The modest Newspaper Guild benefits, for example, were cut off when unemployment insurance—which proBurck in The Chicago Sun-Times "Greatest Thing Since The Invention of Movable Type" vided a maximum of $50 a week— became available...
...Powers carries an attache case and would look incongruous in a cloth cap, but he is more like a British than an American labor leader in his identification with his working class origins...
...This was a remarkable statement, for it is hardly customary for the President of the United States to attack a local union leader by name...
...He feared that if the deliverers and then the pressmen agreed to the $10.07 package, the pressures would mount on him to accept the same deal...
...So did Elmer Brown, on behalf of the executive council of the ITU...
...The original expectation was that this mopping-up operation would take a week...
...Another twenty-three days were required, however, to get all the unions back to work...
...its only effect was further to inflame the controversy...
...It had been drafted by Pierre Salinger, the President's press secretary, who was convinced, that Powers was the primary obstacle to a settlement...
...After the referendum was announced, late in December, some of the publishers deluded themselves into believing that the assessment might again be rejected, with the result that the ITU would soon run out of money and Powers would be forced to send his men back to work...
...Moreover, as early as April, 1962, when representatives of the employers and unions met to work out new bargaining mechanisms, Powers vigorously voiced his objections to follow-the-Guild "pattern bargaining" and "eleventh hour" settlements...
...He can also be disarmingly candid...
...a fair comment is that one of the therapies would have been to end the Guild's role as pace-setter...
...In September, 1961, Powers told his members, "I am convinced that only a long strike or the ability to conduct a strike with the active support of other unions in our industry will swing the pendulum so that we might obtain those things that belong to us...
...So it was still pattern-bargaining, but the ITU—rather than the Guild—was now setting the pattern...
...It was widely noted that Elmer Brown, the president of the ITU, did not come to New York to assist in the negotiations until after the referendum...
...They had a sweet thing going for them, but in the end it cost them dearly...
...Salinger believed that Presidential criticism of Powers would help swing the other unions against him...
...On the climactic evening of December 7, Bradford, who headed the publishers' negotiating committee, predicted that the ITU would not strike...
...The parties were set on a collision course, Powers knowing what he was doing and the publishers oblivious to the danger...
...At that late date, The Post's reappearance had little effect on the course of the strike...
...It took a strenuous hour and a half of argument, just before dawn, to persuade Powers to accept...
...Negotiations with the pressmen never got that far...
...Powers' detractors would speak boldly to the publishers, but they were never a match for him when the committee—irreverently called the "disunity committee"— met...
...Amory Bradford, for one, now believes that the publishers' error was in not responding with a city-wide shutdown when the Guild struck The News on October 31...
...Dorothy Schiff, its owner, was on several occasions strongly impelled to resume publication...
...in January the situation might well have been different...
...by mid-October, considerable progress had been made in resolving minor issues...
...the pressmen are currently holding merger talks with the ITU on the international level...
...The publishers' justification for the lockout (a harsh term which they carefully avoided) was the need to present the same sort of united front which the unions had contrived: when one struck, all stopped work...
...The publishers' morale was again boosted in February when President Kennedy, during a press conference, stated that "the local of the International Typographical Union and its president, Bertram Powers, insofar as anyone can understand his position, are attempting to impose a settlement which could shut down several newspapers in New York and throw thousands out of work...
...Not only did the ITU feel slighted, but its members gradually came to believe that they were losing money...
...The union was able to argue, in effect, that its target was only the more profitable newspapers and that it was not in itself causing a total newspaper blackout...
...Ross has written two books: "Strategy for Liberals" and "The Image Merchants...
...Presidential elections, past performance in key districts would presumably indicate significant trends in the early vote...
...A major argument in its favor was that it was too late to strike over a 1960 contract and too early for the 1962 one...
...The facts were far more complicated...
...The final vote was 62,913 to 21,869...
...The publishers did fear a walkout on the part of the deliverers, whose contract was to expire at midnight and who had a tradition of "no contract, no work...
...A ludicrous instance of the publishers' misjudgment involved the February referendum by the ITU on the question of imposing a three per cent per week wage assessment to replenish its strike fund...
...The Tribune continued to publish in Paris and The Times in Paris and Los Angeles...
...In the end, the other unions all agreed to the $12.63 package which the ITU had won—without the reduction in hours, except in two minor instances...
...It was a weird strike in many ways, and not least in the large gap between appearance and reality...
...At 1:45 a.m., fifteen minutes before its strike deadline, the ITU resumed contract talks with the publishers...
...In October, the ITU membership had rejected a similar proposal...
...By improvising in many ways, you can put out a newspaper without reporters, but not without compositors and pressmen...
...Schiff to defect in January, but she waited until the unprofitable publishing period was over and resumed publication at the beginning of March, in good time to pick up pre-Easter advertising...
...Bert Powers balked...
...In prior years, the union had frequently negotiated beyond the contract expiration date, sometimes for months, with the new contract then applied retroactively...
...Not only was Powers convinced that a long strike would be necessary, but both sides were in no urgent need to settle...
...The strike was called by Local 6 of the International Typographical Union, one of the most responsible and democratically controlled unions in the country...
...On January 26, the negotiations had been transferred to City Hall...
...If that should happen, the ITU will have won a $17.63 package rather than one worth $12.63...
...an arbitrator would determine the amount if the two sides could not agree...
...I don't know that it's a fair question," Powers says mildly, pointing out that his local has not had an official strike since 1883...
...He refused to reveal, even privately, what he regarded as the area of potential settlement...
...The thirst for a showdown was clearly evident, however...
...Through the long weeks of the strike, as Powers' unofficial asking price necessarily went down, he infuriated the other union leaders by never revealing his true settlement terms...
...On the other hand, had the publishers taken Powers seriously last autumn, they would not have settled first with the Guild but would have initially tried to strike a bargain with the ITU, thereby offering Powers his principal goal—the reestablishment of his union's preeminence...
...Until its very end, the dispute resisted the mediatory gambits of every expert who sought to settle it...
...From 1953 to 1961 he was a staff writer for The New York Post...
...in the meantime the publishers were engrossed in negotiations with the Newspaper Guild, whose contracts were due to expire on October 31...
...Most of the publishers were greatly pleased with the board's report, though it was of no utility in hastening a settlement...
...Few citizens had reason to believe that they were witnessing the beginning of one of the most intractable and baffling conflicts in modern labor history...
...This limitation on increased overtime was likely to preclude a reduction in hours for the other crafts, and hence was acceptable to the publishers...
...In every shop, a veteran ITU member making $141 or $146 a week had the galling experience of seeing pressmen and photo-engravers earning $250 or more, with overtime...
...Why had it happened...
...For if the strike were settled before the referendum, the members might well have voted down the three per cent wage assessment and the International, already more than $3,000,000 in debt because of strike benefits, would have been in considerable financial embarrassment...
...The research for this article was financed by a grant from the Philip M. Stern Family Fund of Washington, D.C...
...There were other obstacles to a settlement, among them Powers' disconcerting habit of occasionally changing his mind about the concessions he was willing to make...
...The publishers were opposed to establishing the principle of "sharing" in savings from technological improvements...
...They had a point...
...Once she did so, Powers felt that the competitive pressures on the two other afternoon papers would speed a settlement...
...The Post was indeed the weakest link in the publishers' front...
...He made no secret of his intentions...
...After the seventh week, the members became eligible for unemployment compensation, which brought the average benefits to about $120 a week, a figure which compared quite favorably with the basic weekly wage of $141...
...As for the future, two new instruments have been proposed to help avoid another collapse: a labor-management board to consider, in an atmosphere free of bargaining pressure, the perplexing problems created by the introduction of new technological processes...
...Powers was asking for a package which the publishers estimated would cost about $98 per man per week...
...While Powers did not single-handedly engineer the 1962 strike, it might well have been lost without him...
...For joint bargaining to be successful, however, some way would have to be found of submerging inter-union rivalries...
...There was a good deal of brave talk about publishing with VariType—a process of typing and photographing copy rather than using metal type set by linotype machines...
...As a matter of policy, the ITU limits overtime earnings in order to spread the work...
...Powers' conduct throughout the dispute, which often appeared wilful or eccentric, cannot be understood except in relation to the inter-union situation...
...The incredible fact, however, was that the publishers did not believe him...
...His strategy was simple: to outsit the publishers and wait for one of their number to defect...
...Presumably, this will cost the publishers very little...
...Had he not had this problem, he could have indulged in those private diplomatic exchanges with the employers which are commonplace in stable bargaining relationships...
...They therefore concentrated on the deliverers' negotiation, offering a contract worth $10.07...
...It seems doubtful, for the publishers were not of a mind to offer anything like $12.63 in early December—even if Powers would have accepted it...
...In view of the dangers ahead, the publishers were eager for early opening of contract talks with each of the unions...
...Most members of the other unions did not fare as well...
...The strike was rooted in a decade of discontent on the part of the local ITU...
...he had but two years of high school, one year with the Civilian Conservation Corps...
...The publishers also entertained hopes that the other unions would at least pressure Powers into making a responsible settlement...
...This the publishers were loath to do, for they believed that the Guild gave them less trouble than the other unions were likely to...
...On the face of it, this was a more realistic expectation, but it was based on a false reading of the situation within the unity committee...
...Similarly, the proposal neatly resolved the dispute about outside tape...
...Why a long strike...
...The most plausible explanation, despite the union's denials, was that Powers was dragging his feet until the February 6 referendum...
...Negotiations with the ITU began in July...
...Most of the other papers later made the same deal...
...The publishers were the innocent victims...
...Moreover, unemployment compensation is not subject to income tax...
...Although Powers was not without a measure of anxiety about the steadfastness of the other unions, there was never a chance that they would cross his picket lines...
...For the same reason, Powers was determined not to "stop the clock," for even a day's delay might have allowed his union rivals to regroup successfully against him...
...In January, Mayor Wagner, Governor Rockefeller, and Secretary of Labor Wirtz established a three-member Board of Public Accountability, which called for testimony from the publishers and the unions (Powers refused to appear...
...The truth, probably, is that labor relations in the New York newspaper industry had deteriorated to the point last year where a strike was inevitable one month or the other...
...The ITU would then have been as badly off, from his standpoint, as when it had followed the Guild's lead...
...No agreement was reached with any paper and at midnight October 31, the Guild struck The News, a tabloid which is regarded as the most profitable newspaper in New York...
...Finally, the publishers had made no arrangements to acquire VariType machines and it was doubtful that the marginal papers, like The Post, would undertake the enormous expense...
...When the shutdown was in its fiftieth day, Mayor Robert Wagner brought both sides to City Hall for intensive, round-the-clock negotiations...
...The strike and lockout lasted nearly four months, causing economic losses variously estimated at from $189,350,000 to $250,000,000...
...thereafter, December is a month of thin newspapers and January and February are basically unprofitable...
...A newspaper strike was hardly a rarity in New York...
...Powers reduced his demands to some $38, which was still a long way from the publishers' last offer of $9.20...
...But the early returns pointed to overwhelming adoption of the assessment, and McVay soon abandoned his comparisons...
...and payments to the union from the savings the publishers were expected to realize by using Associated Press and United Press International teletype-setter tape to set stock market tables...
...In the early weeks, they spent a good deal of time casting up names for arbitration or factfinding boards, despite the ITU's well-known antipathy to either kind of body...
...Powers spent most of the evening at a meeting of the unity committee, at the same hotel...
...The date, he suggested, was the following year...
...After the walkout occurred, the publishers bitterly accused Powers of having been determined on a strike...
...Mayor Wagner recommended a wage and fringe-benefit package estimated to cost $12.63 a week in the second year of the contract...
...Had that occurred, the strike might have been shorter—because this was the most profitable period of the year—and the publishers might conceivably not have had to pay as much to satisfy Powers...
...The personality of Amory Bradford, the publishers' chief negotiator, also did not smooth the path to settlement...
...But 1962 was obviously different, for the International had broken with precedent and granted Local 6 strike authorization even before the old contract expired...
...Moreover, the skilled ITU compositors could not substantially increase their take-home pay by fat overtime earnings as could the other crafts...
...The accusation was just, though hardly damaging from Powers' point of view...
...On first meeting, he may betray a certain wariness and tension, but when he relaxes he bears no resemblance to his press notices: one cannot detect the fanatic gleam in the eye...
...After eight days, the Guild settled for a package that added up to 18.50 in the second year of the contract...
...instead it required an excruciating three weeks, in the course of which both the typographers and the photo-engravers first rejected and then accepted the proposed contracts...
...As in U.S...
...From the outset, their plan was to try to persuade the other unions to sign contracts, split with Powers, and go back to work...
...The publishers took to settling their negotiations with the Guild and then forcing the mechanical unions to accept substantially the same dollar package...
...So Mayor Wagner's recommendations avoided the term "sharing" or the establishment of a fund and merely provided for "payments" from the publishers...
...The effect of straight dollar wage increases—rather than percentage increases—was to narrow the differentials between skilled and unskilled workers...
...and a joint council of the ten newspaper unions, more tightly organized than the old unity committee, to develop a less contentious method of bargaining with the city's publishers...
...The union refused, and the strike was on...
...If the concession could be limited to Local 6, the publishers had no great objection, for the typographers did not draw much over...
...These are at least skilled crafts...
...His articles have appeared in Reader's Digest, Harper's, Saturday Evening Post, and Commentary, as well as The Progressive...
...Thayer offered no retrospective suggestions...
...His real concern, in the final days and hours before the deadline, was that somehow he might be out-maneuvered, prevented from striking and thus forced to accept a "pattern" first set with another union...
...its New York local was established by Horace Greeley...
...On the other hand, in this instance the publishers were willing to pay something for the privilege of using tape...
...The Scripps-Howard and Hearst organizations had an additional anxiety —that a breakthrough in New York would cause a chain reaction elsewhere in the country which would cost them dearly...
...No meetings were scheduled from October 15 to November 16...
...The ideal solution would seem to be one big union...
...A picket line is sacrosanct in a union town like New York...
...A strike could not have been prevented last year," says Walter N. Thayer, president of The Herald Tribune...
...One would be more confident of the answer if there were any certainty that another seventy-nine years would elapse before the next strike...
...He had in mind The Post, a liberal afternoon newspaper which lacked the financial resources of its chain rivals, the Scripps-Howard, World-Telegram and the Hearst Journal-American...
...Powers' hunch about The Post was correct, but not his timing...
...The publishers also miscalculated the effectiveness of government intervention...
...The publishers were well aware of what Powers was up to...
...Prior to 1950, the ITU was the pioneering mechanical union in the New York newspaper industry...
...Apart from an economic predisposition towards a long strike, a variety of other circumstances delayed a settlement...
...He worked at the trade until ten years ago, when he became an organizer of Local 6. And, throughout, he read books...
...It was clear that neither side was obliged to accept the proposal...
...This was still sheer fantasy, with the contract expiration date little more than two days off...
...On the question of hours, it provided, in effect, that the one and a quarter hour weekly reduction would be recaptured from "wash-up" time with the consequence that the typographers would work no more than their present amount of overtime...
...Elsewhere in the Hotel New Yorker, negotiations were quietly going forward with the pressmen...
...indeed, he systematically prepared his membership for the long-heralded encounter and assumed the leadership of a unity committee of the officers of the ten newspaper unions...
...Moreover, Kheel drafted the proposal after endless conferences with both sides...
...From the eighth through the twenty-eighth day of the strike, publishers with full insurance coverage received $11,000 for each weekday and $22,000 for Sunday...
...A measure of progress was made during the first few days, then the talks bogged down again...
...Moreover, every paper but The News recovered part of its losses through strike insurance...
...The restlessness of the ITU rank-and-file was evident in the declining margins by which new contracts were ratified...
...Then came the New York strike and another in Cleveland, which together were draining the International's defense fund...
...The typographers also had the financial resources to sustain a long struggle...
...To begin at the beginning: the basic cause of the strike was a drive on the part of Local 6 to reassert its traditional preeminence among the newspaper unions...
...Now forty-one years old, Powers is a handsome, tall, angular man with blondish-gray hair...
...Powers had his victory—and New York had a 114-day strike...
...In the early weeks, Federal, state, and city mediators found both sides immovable...
...He was annoyed because Brown had taken over in the final stages of the negotiations, and felt that his members were entitled to an additional two days sick leave in the new contract—an item which would have cost another $1.25 a week...
...The dispute had dragged on for so long, however, that no one was in a position to restrain Mayor Wagner from making his "mediator's proposal," as it was called by Theodore Kheel, who wrote the document...
...On one occasion, Bradford's rudeness led even the usually imperturbable Kheel to remove himself from the negotiations...
...such was their own view of the matter, and throughout the strike they proved far more adept at public relations than the union...
...The deadlock came on the money items...
...The depression was a personal trauma which he vividly recalls...
...Possessed of a hair-trigger temper, he is gracious one moment and witheringly disdainful the next...
...There was one other circumstance which perhaps made a lengthy strike less uncongenial to two of the papers...
...The News and The Mirror did not...
...At the headquarters of the Publishers Association, executive secretary Donald R. McVay even had a scoresheet prepared listing the returns in prior referendums in the major ITU cities around the country...
...The stalemate was finally broken when Mayor Wagner handed down a recommended settlement early on the morning of March 8. This was doubtless the deftest mediatory maneuver in the entire dispute...
...Powers would speak his piece, and the rebels often ended by pledging undying loyalty...
...they argued that the regular biennial wage increases gave the union its share...
...The 1960 contract was not approved until September, 1961, and passed by only about 250 votes out of some 7,000 cast in a referendum...
...Bradford is a handsome, tweedy New Englander whose intellectual gifts are matched only by his arrogance...
...Many of the other unions, however, enjoyed substantial overtime, and the publishers could see no chance of denying them the reduced work week if Powers got it...
...Powers, it was widely suggested, was indifferent to the distress and dislocation his strike was causing and was animated largely by a desire to become president of the International Typographical Union...
...Once the strike began, a protracted siege was perhaps inevitable...
Vol. 27 • June 1963 • No. 6
