The Strike Problem

In Minneapolis, the bitter strike against John Cowles's Star and Tribune finally ended last week -having set a new and dismal record. The two papers had been silenced for 113 days -nearly two weeks longer than the previous record, established during a 1953 strike of the Seattle Times. As the Star and Tribune scrambled to get back into print, it was painfully clear that in the protracted and expensive showdown everyone was the loser.

Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters started the strike in the first place, by leading four other shop unions in a walkout April 12 -a movement sympathetically, if not enthusiastically, joined by the American Newspaper Guild. As the other unions trickled back to work, the Teamsters stubbornly held out; they settled only after pinching an extra penny or two an hour more than anyone else. The long layoff cost both sides dearly: an estimated $12.5 million in revenue for the papers, some $3,000,000 in wages for the strikers. But the Minneapolis strike raised a question that was even more disturbing than the strike's local effects: with the number of newspapers in the U.S. dwindling at a worrisome rate, has labor's ultimate weapon become too dangerous to wield?

Will to Resist. The Minneapolis experience suggests that this may be so. When the unions throttled the city's two newspaper voices, they clearly miscalculated management's means -and wil -to resist. The papers simply refused to cave in. In dealing with the holdout Teamsters, the Star and Tribune proved just as stubborn as Hoffa.

Newspaper history is studded with examples of similar miscalculations, most recently in Milwaukee, where a strike against Hearst's sickly morning Sentinel cost the American Newspaper Guild a 320-man local. Instead of meeting Guild demands, Hearst sold the Sentinel to the Milwaukee Journal -which is non-Guild. Papers in Portland, Ore., were once organized by both craft unions and the Guild, but no more: struck in 1960, the Oregonian and the Oregon Journal promptly imported and trained non-union help. The profitable Philadelphia Record died during a 1947 Guild strike; also struck by the Guild, the Brooklyn Eagle stopped flying in 1955.

Strikes have also led papers to combine operations, thereby cutting not only costs but jobs. In the midst of a 1959 Guild strike, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat sold its plant to the Post-Dispatch and moved into the Post building. Net job loss to the printing trade and associated unions, as the two papers merged shops: at least 180 hands. Strikes have inspired, or at least expedited, similar management responses in Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Columbus, Ohio.

Barely a Dent. Newspaper unions say, with considerable justice, that the newspaper field is shrinking, and that labor costs are only one factor. But that factor is large. In the past five years, newspaper unions have staged 81 strikes, only 14 of them by the Guild.

In their attempt to organize the newspaper business, the unions are now losing ground. After 29 years of trying, the Guild, for example, has barely made a dent: although Guildsmen are sprinkled throughout most of the nation's 1,761 dailies, the Guild has contracts with only 171 papers -five fewer than it had just three years ago. In 1938 the Guild membership included 13,505 editorial workers; today, although Guild membership is up to 28,000, the editorial worker category has remained about the same, at 13,300. The difference is accounted for by the clerks, stenographers, office boys, advertising salesmen and janitors who now qualify for membership. "The continuing series of mergers and suspensions is taking away our members," says William J. Farson, the Guild's executive vice president. "During the past year we lost 600 members in three cities alone -New York, Pittsburgh and Detroit." The printing craft unions have fared little better.

Dilemma. Such gloomy statistics spell out a quandary that 20th century newspaper unions find increasingly difficult to resolve. For fear of losing, they do not dare challenge the sturdy and well-heeled independent papers that have successfully resisted organization for years: the Los Angeles Times, the Milwaukee Journal, the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Kansas City Star. And when they strike papers that are insecure enough to be susceptible to such assault, the unions now run a double risk. A strike may goad a desperate management into intransigence, or else hasten the death of a paper and yet another collection of jobs.

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