Fixing the Blame

It was an old record, the needle stuck in a groove, stuttering the same strident chords, assailing ears that had grown weary of the tune. Going into its second month, New York's newspaper strike had turned into something of a bore. Manhattan readers grazed on a new crop of strike-born dailies, none of which served as a satisfactory substitute for the missing newspapers. In their separate camps, the publishers and the striking printers hibernated like bears waiting for spring.

Severe Handicap. But if the strike was a bore, it was also a painfully expensive one. The American Newspaper Guild ran out of money and had to borrow $300,000 from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. New York Local 6 of the International Typographical Union slapped a $3 weekly assessment on all 6,000 of its working members--those employed by commercial print shops and therefore unaffected by the strike. New York Newspaper Printing Pressmen Local 2 hopefully brought suit against the New York Post, the Herald Tribune and the Mirror, asking $72,000 in lost pay and other benefits. Since these papers had not been struck but had closed down when the I.T.U. struck the other four dailies, the union claimed that the pressmen had been unlawfully deprived of their jobs. For the 900 New York Timesmen still at work in the U.S. and abroad, Publisher Orvil Dryfoos ordered pay cuts ranging from 20% (for salaries under $15,000) to 50% (over $15,000).

Such measures promised only to extend a shutdown that had already lasted scandalously long. The most impressive agency actively seeking a solution to the strike was an ad hoc board with no power whatsoever. This was the Board of Public Accountability, a panel of three judges--Harold R. Medina, Joseph O'Grady, David W. Peck--appointed by U.S. Labor Secretary W. Willard Wirtz last week to hear witnesses from both sides. I.T.U.

Local President Bertram A. Powers, whose men instigated the strike, stubbornly boycotted the board, but just about everybody else showed up to speak his piece.

For a few hopeful moments, it seemed that the judges might have catalyzed a break in the strike. "Let me suggest a way out," said John Harold, attorney for the Pressmen's Unit; he confided to the panel that his union's membership was "close to a settlement." The judges promptly recessed to let the pressmen and the publishers come together in negotiations that went on all night. But this produced only an objection by Bert Powers. "A severe handicap," said he. "It puts us in a disadvantageous position to have a second union negotiating while we're negotiating."

After three days of testimony, the judges reached their conclusion. Although Federal Judge Harold Medina,* 74, fiery chairman of the panel, might have preferred stronger language, the panel left no doubt about whom it held accountable.

That man was Bert Powers. The strike, said the judges' report, was "a deliberate design" to "postpone any negotiation until a time when the publishers would be forced to surrender under the economic pressure of threatened extinction."

*Famed as presiding judge in the 1949 trial of eleven U.S. Communists, which lasted almost nine months.

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