At Last

Stilled for 114 days, New York's presses were rolling again this week after the longest and costliest (see box) newspaper strike in the city's history. The striking photoengravers, last of the holdouts, met Sunday morning to reverse their earlier rejection of a new contract, and the eight blacked-out newspapers were on the streets by the very next day.

So often had New Yorkers been fooled by false armistices that they were unable to believe the strike had ended until the now-unfamiliar dailies were there on the newsstands. Only last week, everybody thought it was over, and the papers actually were ready to roll. At the Herald Tribune, the next morning's edition was on its way to the composing room. Atop New Jersey's Palisades, the Daily Mirror had rigged a fireworks display to celebrate the end of the affair. Outside the offices of the silenced dailies, hundreds of workers waited impatiently for the picket lines to part so they could dash inside.

No Fireworks. But the fireworks never went off, and the strike went on. The photoengravers, the best-paid among New York's nine newspaper craft unions, with ton weekly salaries of $160.75, were not quite satisfied. Though they had offered the photoengravers a $12.63 deal, the publishers refused to reduce the current 36 1/4-hour week to 35 hours until next year.

"We don't like this," said Photoengravers President Frank McGowan in urging ratification, "but it's the best we can get." His members figured they could get better.

By a 191-to-111 vote, they turned down the contract, and some 20,000 men and women idled since Dec. 8 had to wait a while longer to get back to work.

Just two weeks before, the strike had also seemed at an end, but Bert Powers' striking printers kept it going by thumbing down a package deal of $12.63 a week. And why not? On the job, the top day scale was $141 per week; for not working, they were getting an average of $121 a week in strike benefits and unemployment insurance (both tax free). But the parent International Typographical Union put the heat on the printers by hinting it would cut off their benefits, and when the printers met again last week, the contract was approved 2,562 to 1,763.

Premature Countdown. Last week, on the eve of what they thought would be the end of the strike, the Times and the Trib announced that they were doubling their prices to a dime--something the Trib has been itching to do for years but could not face as long as its chief rival sold for a nickel. To herald its return, the Trib printed a giveaway, four-page "appetizer" edition advising New Yorkers in bold headlines to COUNT THE HOURS TILL WE'RE BACK.

Some columnists completed the countdown prematurely by cranking out pieces they thought were timed to coincide with the return of the papers. In his light "Observer" column, Timesman Russell Baker quoted a fictional fellow at the Press Club bar: "How'd you like to be a columnist like me with a reputation to uphold, knowing you've got to come on strong with your first piece to show them you haven't lost your stuff?" Times Washington Bureau Chief James Reston seemed to be listening. He came on strong with a sharply critical piece comparing the Kennedy Administration to "a PT-boat operation" characterized by "a great deal of swift and dramatic rushing about." Pundit Arthur Krock turned out a sum-up column, and by the time Krock finished cataloguing America's woes--"There is no space remaining here for even the briefest citation of the President's trouble in national and international financial and fiscal mat ters"--New Yorkers might have been almost grateful to the photoengravers for prolonging their blissful ignorance.

For Next Time? Almost--but not quite. "I am very disappointed," said Trib Director Walter Thayer after the photo-engravers' first vote. Said Mayor Wagner, heavy-lidded after serving as mediator during weeks of late-night negotiations: "Here we go again." But the publishers agreed to reshuffle some provisions of the contract while keeping the dollar total the same, and the engravers found this more to their liking. They approved the deal by a thumping 213-to-104 vote and the Mayor's gloomy words suddenly took on new meaning. After 16 weeks, New York's papers were indeed ready to go again.

To forestall similar last-minute snafus in the future, leaders of the city's ten newspaper unions and the publishers were already thinking seriously in terms of industry-wide bargaining. If they get it, Bert Powers figures to run the show for labor--and that can hardly be a comforting thought to the publishers. As things stand, a two-year truce has been arranged, with a chance that hostilities will reopen as soon as the new contracts expire in 1965. Powers even distributed a warning to his picketing printers last week. "DO

NOT TEAR UP YOUR PICKET SIGNS," it read.

"They are to be stored at chapel headquarters."

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