Page:Columbia Journalism Review volume 2 issue 1.djvu/22

 recommendations of his own. Their second was that the talks be off the record. The wall of secrecy was made so tight that even the other members of the Unity Committee were denied information about the precise positions of the printers and the publishers.

The first few days at City Hall were unusually fruitful. Mr. Powers indicated he would drop his pressure for an extra welfare contribution, thus cutting his minimum asking price to $13.75. The employers raised their money offer to $11.04, but the increase was hitched to a 26-month contract. Since all their calculations of what they could afford were based on a yardstick of 42 cents in new labor costs for each month, this was merely a new twist on the contract they had offered the deliverers Dec. 8.

Progress was made on the issue of using Teletypesetter tape for stock tables, even though the reluctance of the publishers to acknowledge specifically the printers' right to a share of savings presented an unresolved semantic hurdle. Just when a new optimism was taking hold, the talks started moving backward again on the 35-hour week.

Mr. Kheel, seeking to ward off a fresh impasse, came up with a novel formula for neutralizing the cost of the shorter week through a blend of overtime and wash-up time. Mr. Powers pronounced it ingenious but too complicated to sell to the members. Despite this objection, the mediator tried it out on the publishers. He bade them get out their pencils because it would be hard to understand.

At this Mr. Bradford told the Mayor that he was ind tired of the whole proceedings and could see no reason why the publishers had to keep wasting time by coming to City Hall.

"If that's the way you feel," Mr. Kheel exclaimed, "why don't you leave? Because if you don't I will. I certainly have got better things to do."

The other members of the employer committee Mrs. Schiff, Mr. Thayer and Mr. Flynn—did not join in the Bradford complaint. But after they had gone Mr. Kheel notified the Mayor that he was pulling out. The next day Orvil E. Dryfoos, president and publisher of The Times, visited the mediator at his home and assured him that the employers wanted him to stay. Mr. Kheel, in turn, told Mr. Dryfoos that it was very important that Mr. Bradford also remain in the negotiations.

'Printers' Leader Hard to Pin Down Despite the decision of both men to stay on the job, the momentum went out of the City Hall talks in the second week. Part of the explanation was that Mr. Powers backtracked on some of the commitments he had seemed willing to volunteer on the use of tape and on money. These retreats impelled Mr. Kheel to describe him as "a jitterbug bargainer —he giveth and he taketh away."

Throughout the negotiations complaints were frequent from mediators, the employers and other unionists that Mr. Powers changed his mind so often on what he was prepared to do that no valid assessment of his goals ever could be made.

Another explanation for the slackening of the Wagner mediation efforts was that the parent I.T.U. had scheduled a national referendum among its 115,000 members on a 3 per cent wage assessment to replenish its defense fund, emptied by the cost of benefits for the New York and Cleveland strikers. The fund was already more than $2,000,000 in debt to I.T.U. locals for loans made to prevent aa suspension of benefit payments,

A referendum in mid-October to prepare for the walkouts by raising the fund's minimum reserve from $500,000 to $5,000,000 had been defeated by a margin of 53,880 to 21,524. With the new vote set for Feb. 6 and with the union's solvency dependent on approval, there was a general feeling at City Hall that no settlement could be expected until the referendum was over.

During this period of drift, ill-feeling between Mr. Powers and some of his associates on the Unity Committee kept bubbling to the surface. Leaders of the other unions charged that Big Six was deliberately stalling in the negotiations because even the prospect of an early settlement might undermine support for the assessment. Mr. Powers replied that all the delay was on the publishers' side and that he was as eager as ever for an agreement.

One night, when a long wait for Mr. Powers to emerge from a session with the employers had left the committee's nerves edgy, its members spotted him walking down the corridor, with his overcoat on. Joseph Baer of the deliverers' union, a stocky, muscular man, a head shorter than Mr. Powers, rushed out to stop his exit. He caught him near the rotunda, blocked his passage with a restraining hand and upbraided him for not having the courtesy to inform the other unions what had happened. Mr. Powers turned back quietly and assured the group that the only reason he had not come in was that nothing of moment had developed at the long meeting.

Irritations also made themselves felt in the publishers' councils, but they were mostly over the slowness with which agreement came on any shift in bargaining position, even on minute issues. The head of one morning newspaper said to another, as they left a particularly enervating session at the Publishers Association: "That was like trying to move around in a barrel of molasses."

However, differences on basic matters were infrequent. "If Powers had come in for a slow landing and tempted us more, he might have created more division," one executive observed later, "He was always too far away."

'Nearly $120 a Week Assured Strikers The Feb. 6 referendum resulted in authorization of the assessment by 62,913 to 21,869. The union benefits, coupled with the availability after the strike's eighth week of state unemployment insurance payments, gave the average striker an assured income of just over $120 a week. This was comparable to his normal take-home pay when working. The newspapers had received an estimated total of $2,250,000 in strike insurance payments in the early stages of the shutdown, but these payments had ceased before the union referendum. The News did not share in the insurance payments.

With the union vote no longer a hazard, the Mayor