Strikes for Christmas

For the second time in four years, the biggest metropolitan newspaper-reading public in the U.S. was left without a daily paper to read. After months of wrangling with New York City publishers, members of the typographical union walked out. Only a month before, the New York dailies settled with the American Newspaper Guild, signing a contract that raised wages an average of $8 a week over two years, after an eight-day strike at the Daily News, largest U.S. daily. But that settlement was not enough for the typographers, and the city's daily combined run of 5,700,000 papers put out by 20,000 employees was stopped dead.

Uncomfortable Awareness. Technically, the union was striking against New York's four strongest papers--the morning Times and News and the afternoon Journal-American and World-Telegram. Ostensibly, the union's agreement to permit the morning Herald Tribune and Mirror and the afternoon Post to continue publishing was based on the idea that this would allow New Yorkers to get something in the way of news to read. But behind this action was the uncomfortable awareness that the Post and Mirror are primarily too weak financially to withstand a strike of any duration. The publishers saw the four-paper ploy as a union attempt to use one group of papers against the other, and so decided to stop the presses en masse.

The typographers demanded twice the amount the publishers settled for with the Guild, plus shorter hours and new fringe benefits, including increased vacations. When the walkout came, some publishers put the blame squarely on Bertram A. Powers, 40, tough president of the New York Typographical Union No. 6. They charged that Powers is trying to make a name for himself with a successful strike against the big-city dailies. According to this reasoning, Powers deliberately set his union's demands at an unacceptable high. Said one disgusted publisher: "Powers wants a deed to the premises."

Inadequate Substitute. Though the walkout came at the peak of the Christmas shopping season, New York's papers had already carried the major portion of their gift advertising before they stopped the presses. Those that publish Sunday papers managed also to get ad-packed editions, made up of early-printed sections, off the presses before the walkout.

With the strike in full force, metropolitan radio and TV stations swiftly expanded their news coverage, but this was at best an inadequate substitute for the papers. The last New York City newspaper blackout ran for 19 days during the 1958 Christmas season. How long the current one would last was anybody's guess, but both sides sounded as if they were digging in for a long siege.

Cleveland's two daily newspapers were hopefully getting ready to rev up their presses following a strike that has blacked out that city's news-by-reading since Nov. 29. Two unions--the American Newspaper Guild and Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters--had shut down the morning Plain Dealer and the afternoon Press & News after coming to a stalemate in negotiations on job security and wage increases. At week's end, a local citizens' committee talked the drivers into returning to work and was waiting for assent from the Guild. All told, the strike cost Cleveland's papers nearly half a million dollars in lost Christmas-shopping advertising.

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