The Strikebreaker

At 70, he is plagued with eye cataracts, and his office is the cluttered corner of a Zionsville, Ind. farmhouse, which he claims was once used as a chicken roost. But restless, lank Bloor Schleppey has a role in American journalism as unusual as his name: he breaks strikes for pay.

For the past quarter-century, ex-Newsman Schleppey's principal antagonist has been the tightly organized International Typographical Union. When publishers were hit with an I.T.U. strike, they called Schleppey. Within hours Schleppey was on hand, and his men were swarming into town by car, plane and train: a gang of nonunion compositors and Linotype operators who moved into the struck composing room, kept the paper going until new workers could be recruited locally and trained to replace the strikers. Says Schleppey: "It's a terrific job--you've got to have a rugged constitution. I've got one."

"Scab Herder." Last week Schleppey's hired hands were getting out the daily editions for the I.T.U.-struck Haverhill (Mass.) Gazette and the Worcester (Mass.) Telegram. A Schleppey associate named Shirley Klein, who calls herself a "legal consultant," is directing another combat team in the I.T.U. strike against the eleven-paper Macy chain in New York's Westchester County.

"Scab herder" is the I.T.U.'s word for Schleppey. Schleppey himself, who prefers the term "publisher's counsel," admits he has fought 30 strikes over the years and lost "only a few." But he likes to emphasize that he also acts as a labor consultant at the bargaining table, claims his interventions have headed off some 70 strikes. "I go into a strike to save the whole operation,'' explains Schleppey. "I'm saving maybe 200 or 300 jobs that the union doesn't care about."

To raise his strikebreakers, Schleppey needs only dial a phone. "I call up publishers who are clients and friends of clients who have nonunion composing rooms," says he. The publishers are happy to spare a man for the cause, Schleppey claims. But anti-Schleppeymen charge that his flying squads are mostly "drunks, misfits, social cripples and are generally incompetent at their work." Within days of their arrival in Haverhill, several Schleppey recruits were arrested for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.

Behind Schleppey, charges the I.T.U., stands the American Newspaper Publishers Association, which has often scheduled him as a convention speaker. But while A.N.P.A. Labor Chief George Dale admits boosting Schleppey ("I don't mind saying I recommended him to the Worcester and Haverhill publishers"), he declares flatly: "We've never paid Schleppey a cent."

Red Ink. Just what he charges clients for breaking a strike, Schleppey refuses to say--"As a general rule, I make less than in my law practice." Schleppey insists that his workers get paid at union scale, but I.T.U. locals charge that they get up to three times as much. Schleppey and his workers get all expenses paid. Working overtime, often sleeping in cots in the plants, Schleppey's crews can make a killing; one Linotype operator in Haverhill boasted to strikers that he earned $2,000 in little more than a month.

During a long strike, the bills for Schleppey's services have given some publishers heavy deficits. It took Schleppey several months to break the back of the I.T.U. strike at the Grand Junction (Colo.) Sentinel, and an ex-bookkeeper for the paper recalls: "I used red ink for a long, long time." In the solidly unionized city of Haverhill, the I.T.U. is fighting back by urging subscribers and advertisers to boycott the Gazette; circulation (11,000) is down 45% and ads are down 40% from pre-strike levels. To make matters worse for the Gazette, Publisher William Loeb of the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader has seized the opportunity to start a rival Haverhill paper.

Up for Hire. Strikebreaker Bloor Schleppey (Bloor was his mother's maiden name*) was born in Crawfordsville, Ind., got a law degree from Indiana University in 1912, then broke into the newspaper business in 1916 on the short-lived Milwaukee Daily News (Schleppey claims he was managing editor; oldtimers remember him as a reporter). In the next years, Schleppey worked for the New York World and the New Orleans Times-Picayune, put in a term as a Washington reporter for the Hearst chain. In 1934 he went to work for the Indianapolis Publishers Association and started his career as a labor specialist.

Last year Schleppey tried to retire to his 150-acre farm, but the composing-room wars in Massachusetts brought him back on the job. This summer Schleppey will have a cataract removed from his left eye, afterwards wants to do nothing but paint pictures and write a book on modern art. But for the time being, Strikebreaker Schleppey is still up for hire. Says he: "I'll never let these publishers down as long as I'm active."

* No kin to the famed Communist agitator of the 1920s and '30s, "Mother Bloor" (whose real name was Ella Reeve Omholt).

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