Bogus Man

Making the rounds one morning, the business manager of a big California daily came upon a pressman snoozing in a corner. It turned out that the dozer had been on the job, or at least on the premises, for 26 straight hours--all but seven at overtime wages. Since there was no apparent reason for the money-wasting marathon, the business manager promptly complained to the shop representative of the International Printing Pressmen and Assistants' Union. The cold reply: "Well, he needed the money."

Against such practices, most U.S. publishers can only shrug helplessly. The pressmen's union is one of the five members of the International Allied Printing Trades Association, which also includes the International Typographical Union, the International Stereotypers' and Electrotypers' Union, the International Photo-Engravers' Union and the International Brotherhood of Bookbinders. Long and powerfully entrenched, the printing-craft unions have brought the make-work science of featherbedding to a level that is the envy of organized labor. Modern presses can roll at 60,000 papers an hour, but at shift-change time, crews frequently cut speed to a few thousand--to run over into overtime. Such stunts can double a pressman's pay, bring it to $15,000 a year.

Printing-craft contracts vary widely from city to city, but the general pattern is consistent. Examples:

P:At the Chicago Sun-Times, when a pressroom foreman decides to clean the ink fountains, he must put eight or ten men on the job instead of the three actually needed.

P:In Detroit, if a compositor works so much as a minute into his lunch period, he gets time and a half for the whole period. A printshop employee, if not notified of a change in his shift before leaving the plant, gets $2 extra "callin" pay--plus overtime until the start of his regular shift.

P:In San Francisco, if a compositor works a minute past 6 p.m., he must be paid a premium night rate for his entire daytime shift.

P:On an industry-wide basis, U.S. publishers pay their shop crews for 22 holidays. In various parts of the country these include Jefferson Davis Day, Pioneer Day, San Jacinto Day, and, on some papers, the worker's birthday.

Of all the printing-craft devices, the most wasteful is that of setting "bogus," or "dead horse," which the International Typographical Union has been getting into contracts since 1871. In its broadest application, bogus compels a newspaper to employ workers to reset the advertisements that have been received and used in mat or plate form. The reset ad is worthless, often consigned at once to the composing-room hellbox for remelting. On the Washington Post and Times Herald, I.T.U. men last week were resetting ads that actually ran in 1957. The New York Times estimated that it dead-horsed 5,750,000 lines of display advertising last year alone.

For six months the I.T.U. has been engaged in a bitter dispute with ten New York papers* on the subject of bogus. Negotiating for a new contract, the union committee has abandoned its showcase demands, e.g., a $30 weekly pay boost for a 30-hour week, settled for management's $7 offer, spread over two years. But to its bogus featherbed the I.T.U. clings for dear life.

Working through a list of 224 specific advertisers, Charles C. Lane, chairman of the publishers' negotiation committee, and I.T.U. President Elmer Brown reached a compromise preponderantly pro-union: no bogus on 88, bogus on 136. But Francis G. Barrett, president of the New York local, opposed these terms. At week's end, if anything at all was certain, it was that the I.T.U. in New York might eventually part with a few feathers, but never the featherbed.

*The Times, Herald Tribune, Mirror, Daily News, World-Telegram and Sun, Journal-Amer ican, Post, Journal of Commerce, Long Island Press and Long Island Star-Journal.

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