Polite Strike

The American Newspaper Guild last week shut down a Seattle newspaper for the third time. But the strike against the prosperous, conservative Seattle Times (circ. 212,608) was like nothing that Seattle newsmen had ever seen before. By local standards, it was more of a tea party than a labor dispute.

Seattle still remembers the violence of the first Guild strike in 1936. The green young Guild got help from Dave Beck's roughhouse A.F.L. Teamsters' Union against Hearst's Post-Intelligencer. Beck's men threw what he called a "wall of living flesh" around the PI, and shut it down tight for three months. In 1937 a second Guild strike against the now-defunct Seattle Star also got rough when the Guild became tangled up with jurisdictional street battles between Beck's Teamsters (no longer Guild allies) and the pro-Guild C.I.O. longshoremen.

Last week's picket line was composed solely of Guild members, predominantly female. Instead of a clout on the head, nonstrikers who braved the line (including Beck's Teamsters) were threatened by women strikers with a lipstick smear on the collar. When Times executives arrived for work, the picket lines parted, polite greetings were exchanged on both sides. Said Assistant City Editor Don Brazier (whose father is the paper's editor) as he walked the picket line: "Nobody is mad at the Times, yet we are determined to win the increase we know we have coming to us."

Times strikers argued that they had an increase coming because 1) the scale for newsmen in high-cost-of-living Seattle had fallen as much as $14 a week behind such smaller West Coast cities as Sacramento and Stockton, Calif., and 2) the prosperous Times was at new circulation and advertising peaks. The Guild had asked across-the-board increases of 7.8%; the Times was offering increases amounting to 3.5% for most staffers. In dollar terms, management and union were only $2 to $4.50 a week apart, but at week's end, both sides seemed determined to wait it out. Meanwhile, with the mechanical unions respecting the Guild picket line, the Times made no attempt to publish. That left Seattle without an afternoon paper, and the morning Post-Intelligencer (circ. 180,828) jumped its daily run to 240,000 to pick up the slack.

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