Showdown on Fleet Street

London's Times and Sunday Times challenge the unions

Sir: To whom would we write letters if there were no Times? Yours faithfully, Mary Large, Grange Farm, North Hykeham.

--Letter to the Times

Quaint as that query may sound to an American, the impending shutdown of the venerable Times and Sunday Times of London is no footling affair to an Englishman. The gloom among Britain's Establishment could be as thick as suet pudding if the Times (circ. 293,000)--the nation's newspaper of record and the favorite forum of impassioned letter writers --suspends publication this week, as now seems likely. Equally wretched will be the 1.4 million readers who look to the Sunday Times for its weekly compendium of news coverage and lively analysis.

The threatened suspension is the result of a complicated and increasingly bitter dispute between the newspapers and their unruly production workers. Unauthorized work stoppages and slowdowns have cost the papers 12 million copies and $5.6 million so far this year. Infuriated, the Toronto-based Thomson Organization Ltd., which has owned the Sunday Times since 1959 and the Times since 1967, has forced a showdown. Thomson executives announced last April that they would give the unions until Nov. 30 to agree to sweeping reforms in work procedures, or else the papers would close down until they relented. All of Fleet Street is watching the confrontation with keen interest: a Times victory could embolden other publishers to try curbing the labor anarchy that has racked Britain's 15 national newspapers for years.

Foremost among the Thomson demands is an end to the wildcat disruptions that have earned the Sunday Times, hardest hit by job actions, the nickname Some Times. The papers' 54 chapels (bargaining units) are also being pressed to accept manning reductions and cost-saving new technology. In exchange, management is offering higher wages and better benefits. The two papers intend to trim 700 or more of their 4,300 workers over the next three years through attrition and voluntary retirements.

By waiting until last month to present detailed proposals, management angered the chapels and reduced chances for a settlement by the deadline. "We object to negotiating with a gun to our heads," says one union leader. The National Graphical Association, which represents 600 Times arid Sunday Times compositors, machine managers and stereotypers, is refusing to come to the bargaining table at all. "Only a fool conspires at the destruction of his members' jobs," says Joe Wade, union general secretary. "No trade union leader in any industry can give an ironclad guarantee of continuous production."

Bolstered by profits from newly developed North Sea oil ventures, the Thomson Organization is clearly capable of withstanding a protracted closure. Although he takes pains to deny it, Company Chairman Kenneth Lord Thomson of Fleet, 55, is said to be less sentimentally attached to the papers than was his late father, Roy, the first Lord Thomson, who considered the acquisitions of the Times (est. 1785) and the Sunday Times (est. 1822) to be the pinnacle of his career.

Times Newspapers Ltd. Managing Director Marmaduke Hussey insists that even if the Times suspends, it will not be gone forever: "Our aim is to build the Times up and keep it going." Bracing for at least a temporary loss of their daily breakfast companion, some readers have offered touching pledges of loyalty. Wrote David Fitzpatrick from Sheffield: "A day without the Times is a desolate day, but if you must leave us for a time in order to put your house in order, so be it. We will be waiting when you return."

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