Strike in New York

Except for the Herald Tribune, New York City's fat Sunday newspapers (combined circ. 7,860,256) were the oddest-looking papers in the U.S. this week. Instead of up-to-the-minute news, across the front pages were off-beat features and stale stories. The tabloid Mirror blanketed Page One with the headline, EX-SPY QUEEN TO TELL OWN STORY, inside explained vaguely that its six-part series by Elizabeth Bentley would begin "soon." The News covered its front page with a picture of the Gabor family at a month-old costume party. "As our readers will notice," explained the Mirror, "the presentation of news and features herewith is unusual." The reason it was "unusual" was that the papers were struck; they had been forced to put their Sunday editions to bed before dawn Saturday, just before they were shut down by a strike of the A.F.L. International Photoengravers Union, Local No. 1.

United Stand. The engravers, who make the photographic and illustrative cuts for newspapers, had asked for a $15 weekly wage increase (present scale: $120 to $131 a week minimums). The publishers, fearing a pacesetting wage increase that would be passed on to all their other unions, locked arms for a joint stand against the engravers and offered a $3.75 weekly "package," which was turned down by the union. When negotiations became deadlocked, the publishers offered to submit the dispute to arbitration, just as engravers on San Francisco papers have agreed to do. But the union voted down what Local President Denis M. Burke called the "last minute" arbitration proposal, because "the last time we went to arbitration with the publishers, an award of 12% salary reduction was made by the arbitrator even though the publishers asked only 10%."

When the 400-odd engravers walked out at the Times, Mirror, News, Post, World Telegram & Sun and Journal-American and surrounded the buildings with pickets, close to 20,000 mechanical, editorial and other employees met the publishers' united front with one of their own; they "spontaneously" refused to cross the picket lines. The only major Manhattan paper not affected was the Herald Tribune (circ. 353,411), which has its engraving done outside its own plant. The Trib got ready to take full-page paid ads from the struck papers, in which the papers planned to run editorials, comics, news and features. But the Trib's "combined newspaper" came to a hasty end when its own unions refused to handle "struck work."

Surprise. Then the Trib pulled a surprise. Instead of coming out with its full morning edition, fat with ads that other struck papers could not print, the Trib ran 2,000,000 copies of an eight-page paper with no ads at all, "in order to give the widest possible distribution to the day's basic news." There was another reason for the thin paper that had little to do with distributing the day's basic news. The Trib, though not directly involved in the strike, actually had as much to lose as any of the struck papers from a settlement favorable to the strikers. Since the Trib is already hard-pressed by spiraling costs, it could ill afford another pacesetting boost. Thus the Trib hoped to encourage the other publishers--especially the affluent Times--to hold the line against the union, not only by refusing to run more ads itself and thereby capitalize on the strike, but by killing those already scheduled. Next day, the Trib carried its effort a step further by not publishing at all.

This week two days after the strike started, the publishers and the union resumed negotiations to try to work out an early settlement.

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