New Record for Stubbornness

Bickering and grandstanding were obviously no help, but that was all the union bosses seemed ready to do as Detroit's newspaper strike approached its 20th week. Pressmen's Union President Freeman Frazee tried to split the two struck papers by marching his men back to the Free Press but not to the News; the maneuver only further antagonized both papers, which bargain together, and Frazee's delegation was stopped by a padlocked pressroom door. Then Jimmy Hoffa put in his unsolicited 2-c- worth. If the papers could somehow publish without pressmen, said the Teamster boss, the truck drivers would deliver them.

Curiously enough, it was another intervening labor leader, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, who broke the deadlock. Apparently looking for a way out of the trap his own stubbornness had sprung, the pressmen's Frazee paid a clandestine visit to Reuther at the U.A.W.'s Solidarity House and humbly asked for help. "I'll make a compromise proposal," Reuther said, "but I won't argue." Within a day, both the papers and Frazee's pressmen accepted the terms.

Reuther's proposals ironed out the remaining issue between the two sides: whether to operate new high-speed presses with 15-man or 16-man crews. For one year, proposed the U.A.W. chief, the presses will run with 16-man crews. Then, unless the pressmen agree to submit the issue to binding arbitration, the 16th man will be dropped.

Since this was almost exactly what the papers had asked for, what had Frazee's strike accomplished? When the papers get back into business this week, his pressmen will be getting substantially the same contract terms that all but one of the other unions agreed upon before the strike began. And since Frazee had already given in on all other demands, his prolonged intransigence netted the pressmen little more than the right to claim that they had spun out the city's ninth newspaper shutdown in nine years to a record 131 days.

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