The Newspaper Strike

The International Typographical Union's strike against four New York daily newspapers and the publishers' lockout at the other three is a disaster. The effects of the information blackout, now in its forty-seventh day, have been enormously destructive to the city's social political and economic life. As for the closing down of the unstruck papers, it is inexcusable; many of the injurious consequences of the strike would vanish if the Post, the Mirror, and the Herald-Tribune would get back into print tomorrow, as they easily could. The strike itself is a more complex matter. The dispute over a wage increase, though complicated by intra- and inter-union politics, can be solved through collective bargaining. But automation is the problem at the heart of this strike, and the Federal government's lack of initiative in facing up to it represents a great national failure.

The first concrete step the situation cries out for, resumption of publication by the dailies which have not been struck, should have been taken long ago. The publishers' slogan, "a strike against one is a strike against all," is self-destructive; the "all for one" policy, in any event, is spottily enforced. Earlier this fall, when the Newspaper Guild struck the Daily News for eight days, none of the other papers closed down. Also, and more importantly, the publishers ignored their responsibility to the public when they chose to complete the press blackout. With three newspapers the city could at least keep an eye on its own government; and some of the economic effects of the strike, such as the slump in the entertainment business and the plight of 300 blind news-boys, would be mitigated.

Powers and Power

The issues which must be settled to bring the strike to an end are of three sorts. The organizational ambitions of Local Six of the I.T.U. and the personal ambitions of its president, Bertram A. Powers, have attracted the most public attention. Powers wants to get to the top of the international union; there is nothing wrong with that, of course, but it is no excuse for prolonging a strike. Local Six, for its part, wants to regain its position as top banana among newspaper unions. The I.T.U.'s former position of leadership is now occupied by the Newspaper Guild, and one way to regain that leadership, Powers reasons, is to win a sensational and unpopular strike.

The fact that the strike is, in some measure, a power play by Powers and Local Six has understandably aggravated the other unions, especially the Newspaper Guild. The I.T.U., like the publishers, has the wherewithal to last out a long strike. The Guild does not. On Monday, the Guild was forced to take the drastic step of mortgaging its headquarters to meet its obligations to its members. At the meeting where the decision was made, Guildsmen loudly booed the name of Bertram Powers.

But the public, the publishers and Judge Harold Medina and his little band of serious fact-finders have contented themselves with condemning Powers. To be sure, his refusal to negotiate seriously the issues of wages and benefits is maddening and inexcusable; and the typographers' wage demands are excessive. They are asking an $18-a-week wage increase, $10 more than the Guild won in its strike last month. (On the other band, his demand for a contract expiration date coinciding with the Guild's is perfectly legitimate, since no union should be hamstrung by the pressures of another union's contract.)

The wage question could be settled if, for example, Mayor Wagner revived Mayor La Guardia's old "locked room" policy--locking negotiators up together in a hotel room until they come to an agreement. For the wage issue only requires sound and skillful negotiating. However, the Mayor has been characteristically absent from the stage of his city's major drama.

But the central issue raised by the newspaper strike cannot be settled by the ordinary processes of negotiation. It is the same issue that is at stake in the East and Gulf Coast dock-workers' strikes and the Philadelphia transit workers' strike: how to deal with men whose jobs are imperiled by the introduction of new machinery. The I.T.U.'s automation policy is extremely conservative; the typographers have rejected even the most reasonable management offer on technological unemployment. The publishers are willing not to fire any men to make room for advanced machinery, but to leave unfilled vacancies created by death or retirement.

The I.T.U. has rejected this plan for a combination of historical and practical reasons. Since it is a craft union--one of the oldest and perhaps the proudest craft union--its members view their jobs virtually as their own property. They consider themselves highly skilled craftsmen (as, indeed, they are), not mere employees who are only important so long as their employers consider them important. The I.T.U. members want to be able to hand their jobs on to their progeny, or otherwise dispose of them as they and theirs see fit. For this same reason, they have "protected" their jobs by indulging in a variety of make-work projects when new machinery is introduced. For example, when automatic typesetters are used to set such tricky and time-consuming material as stock market reports and box scores, union men re-set the material. If advertisers bring in "mats" of type and illustrations to fill their space, all the material it contains must be uselessly re-set by the paper's own typographers.

A National Failure

This behavior is indefensible in itself, and if it were the product of simple spite or high-handedness, the anti-union sentiment which now pervades even liberal circles in New York might be justified. But, in fact, the union's policy is the result of a feeling that while it is apparently faced with decimation of numbers and prestige, no one is paying any attention to its plight. It is convinced that the country is willing to abandon it to the fury of the second industrial revolution, and there is almost nothing in the government's record during the last decade to contradict it. The union is acting out of desperation, not spite.

The government's failure to provide guiding policies for dealing with technological unemployment, its apparent obliviousness to the hardship automation has brought to so many people, is inexcusable. It is as if, in the event of a war, the government built no bombs and trained no troops.

The piecemeal attempts to deal with these problems which characterized Arthur Goldberg's brief career as Secretary of Labor were worse than useless; they distracted attention from the true dimensions of the problem. And while the Man-Power Retraining Program passed by the last Congress constitutes a modest beginning, one can forgive the I.T.U. and anyone else for being concerned when it appears that the President and his advisers consider it a whole program.

Ten years ago, the government should have set into operation a massive study program, perhaps leading to the establishment of a National Employment Agency, to aid in the job of re-settling displaced workers. It should have set up rules for compensating workmen put out of work by machines; and it should have begun collecting information from scattered employers intending to introduce payroll-reducing machinery so that regional and national "automation maps" could be drawn, and plans made in advance for areas or industries that will be especially hard-hit. It is little comfort to speak of what should have been done a decade ago; but it is irrational to expect men to bear the effects of this vast omission uncomplainingly. The cost of this failure in human terms cannot be reckoned; where rational readjustments were possible to meet the introduction of new machinery, the new age of machines has brought only bitterness and hardship to most men who have encountered it personally. They have seen the future--and now they don't work.

The I.T.U. and Automation

When the I.T.U. strike is seen in the context of this enormous social and political failure, it is more comprehensible and more justifiable. As already noted, they consider their jobs something they can pass on to their children; the jobs are their legacies. If it is taken away from them to be replaced by a vague promise that "automation will make new jobs for their children," they have only to look around them to see they are making a very risky swap.

If Powers and publishers' representative Amory Bradford continue to make a settlement of the automation question a condition for ending the strike, it will go on forever. If a wage agreement can be arrived at, the printers should go back to work, leaving the automation question to be arbitrated by the Federal government. If the President can spare a few minutes from his tax charts, he may find that it is not tax reform, but a labor policy, that this country needs most desperately.