Stern v. A. N. P. A.

The organization which speaks loudest and most authoritatively for U. S. newspaper publishers is the 49-year-old American Newspaper Publishers Association, comprising about 500 U. S. dailies and weeklies, a body not dominated or led by such dominant figures as William Randolph Hearst, Roy Wilson Howard or Robert Rutherford ("World's Greatest") Mc-Cormick. The first of these great men has at least made his peace with the lusty young American Newspaper Guild, the three-year-old union of editorial workers which now boasts chapters in 274 U. S. newspaper and news offices, and a total of 5,877 members. Not so the A. N. P. A., whose individualistic members are still prone and proud to tell each other: "I'm not going to let my reporters tell me how to run my paper!" Heartening to A. N. P. A. men was a strong message last week from their directorate, urging them to treat with no American Newspaper Guildsmen or any other editorial employe group, grant no "preferential" employment regulations, arbitrate no dismissals, fix no wages on a definite time scale "regardless of the quality of work."

To this hard-boiled pronouncement, a prompt reply came not from a Guildsman but from liberal, hard-hitting Publisher Julius David Stern of the Philadelphia Record and New York Post. To A. N. P. A.'s directors Publisher Stern wrote:

"The Philadelphia Record hereby resigns from your association.* We are resigning because your association, founded to benefit and strengthen the daily newspapers of this country, has in the last few years so conducted itself as to lower American newspapers in popular esteem, to endanger the freedom of the press, and has even gone so far as to urge its members to breach the law. . . Your board recommended to its membership that 'no agreement be entered into with any group of employes.' As we understand the Wagner Act, it is obligatory upon employers to negotiate with representatives of a majority of employes in any department or craft. Any member of your association who enters into negotiation with employes when he has mental reservations not to make any agreement, only makes a pretense at negotiation. He would not be truly negotiating within the intent of the law.

"This newspaper has a contract with the Guild which does not interfere to the slightest extent with my right to say what shall or shall not be printed in this newspaper. I can order a member of the Guild to write that two and two make five, and fire him without notice if he disobeys, just as I can fire him for drunkenness or any other good and sufficient cause. . . . More than 90% of your members have contracts with typographical, pressmen's and stereotypers' unions. . . . Will you name one instance where any of these mechanical unions has presumed to dictate to a publisher what should or should not be printed in his news or editorial columns? Has anyone ever brought up the issue of the freedom of the press in the unionization of the mechanical processes? Then why should the issue be raised now in reference to the Newspaper Guild, which is intended merely to better wage and working conditions of editorial workers who . . . have been notoriously underpaid?"

Fact is that in resigning from the A. N. P. A., Publisher Stern sacrifices little of practical value to him or any other big publisher. Most momentous activity of A. N. P. A. is its annual convention in Manhattan where speechmaking and elbow-bending far outweigh serious business.

* Mr. Stern's New York Post does not belong.

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