Stubbornness in Baltimore

Since April 20, when the Newspaper Guild struck the Baltimore Sun and other unions refused to cross the picket line, Baltimore has had no newspaper worthy of the name. The city's only other daily, Hearst's News-American, shut down in support of its competitor, and by last week a disheartened NLRB examiner saw no sign of an end to the strike. Management and the Guild, said he, "are at a total stalemate. If it isn't settled soon, I think it'll go on for a long time. At the bargaining sessions, they don't really discuss much. They just run messages back and forth with a lot of recrimination. The Sun's proprietors are aristocratic, stubborn, very respected and very strong."

After 16 years, the Baltimore Guild has grown stubborn itself. It is putting up a stiff fight against management and it feels it is on firm ground. The wealthy Sun papers--the Sun, Evening Sun, and Sunday Sun--carry almost as much advertising linage as the New York Times. By spending lavishly on news coverage, they make just about everybody's list of top papers in the U.S. But they spend precious little on their own employees. They pay a top minimum of $150 a week for experienced reporters; 61 U.S. papers pay higher salaries, including the Kenosha News, the Napa Register, the Pontiac Press, the Gary Post-Tribune. The Sun life-insurance policy pays only $500 per employee--not enough to cover burial expenses. The papers' nine-year-old pension plan works out to less than $25 a month, and there is no company medical plan. Nor is there a dues checkoff or any form of union security.

Help from Washington. The present fracas dates back to last February when the Baltimore Guild merged with the far more militant Washington Guild, which had already won a $200-a-week minimum for Washington Post reporters. During acrimonious contract negotiations, handled by a veteran Washington negotiator, the Guild asked for a $172-a-week minimum and a union shop. But the best offer from management was a $10-a-week raise and no union security. Negotiations heated up and stalled. "The Sun people," said an observer, "are not used to people talking to them like that."

When Hearst's News-American shut down, nine unions filed a complaint of an illegal lockout, and an NLRB examiner backed them up. The News-American plans to take the case to court, but meanwhile the bill for back pay owed to employees is piling up at the rate of over $125,000 a week. If the courts rule against the News-American, the paper will have to pay it all.

Advertising Boycott. Meanwhile, there have been feeble attempts to supply Baltimore with an interim newspaper. The Guild puts out a small daily tabloid, the Baltimore Banner, for which Sun staffers scrape up news from radio and television. But local merchants, friendly to the Sun, provide little advertising and the Banner is losing more than $4,000 a week. A second daily, the New Baltimore Morning Herald, published by Johns Hopkins students' with coed assistance on weekends, has also been hard put to find advertising in a town where the Sun has long been king. But the city is not starved; New York papers crowd the newsstands.

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