Page:Columbia Journalism Review volume 2 issue 2 (summer 1963).djvu/5

 paper business would mean a merger of all unions into a United Newspaper Workers of America. There are recurring proposals for such a merger; they do not appear to be near realization. The Guild’s role has been the trying one of organizing the unorganized. It has had both success and disappointment. It is the only one of many attempts to establish a newspaper- man’s union that achieved permanence. It claims more than 31,000 members, among them more than a third of all newspaper editorial workers in the United States. It has gained contracts with major Canadian newspapers, the wire services, the news magazines, and miscellaneous publications and news agencies,

But it has had many frustrations. Few citadels have fallen in recent years, and Guild locals have declined or passed out of existence in Portland, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and El Paso. Moreover, the largest papers in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Kan- sas City, and major Southern cities have never yielded.

The present condition

Such, in shorthand, have been the gains of the first thirty years, offered as the background against which to measure where the Guild is going today.

Two of the three oldest locals of the Guild were involved in long newspaper blackouts last winter. In Cleveland, the Guild itself was on strike, mainly on the issue of organizing commercial departments. In New York, the Guild, after a brief strike of its own, collaborated in the printers’ strike and revised its newly won contracts to assist in the general settlement.

Clearly, neither local participated with unanimity or high morale. A members’ revolt in Cleveland un- dercut the negotiators. Few members in New York wholeheartedly favored the printers’ tactics or de- mands; a faction wanted to withdraw support. Mean- while, the local went heavily into debt, for members had refused earlier to build a reserve fund. Both cases revealed members’ reluctance to fight on secondary issues — in one case, an extension of jurisdiction; in the other a payment for past and future support.

To help determine whether such reluctance was the product of peculiar stresses or symptoms of a general malaise, the Review solicited its correspondents’ ap- praisals of Guild locals or organizing efforts in other cities. Here, in summary, are the responses:

The San Francisco-Oakland local, third largest in the Guild, is in a “period of complacency,” the corre- spondent writes. The winning of a Guild shop on the San Francisco papers and, in 1959, at the Oakland Tribune, and the raising of wages to adequate levels have fulfilled basic Guild goals.

The large Detroit local represents workers on the Free Press and on labor publications. But the local suffered a blow in 1960 when its founding unit, at the Detroit Times, dissolved with the closing of the paper. The Detroit News has remained unorganized. The Review correspondent believes that the Guild has kept conditions from deteriorating despite the surplus of newspapermen in the labor market. He adds, though, that the Guild does not seem powerful enough now to break new ground.

Reports came from smaller cities with locals com- posed entirely of editorial employees — the type an editorial in the Guild newspaper called “vulnerable chinks in the Guild’s armor.”

One of these, in Richmond, is nearly a quarter of a century old. The correspondent, a member, reports that enthusiasm is low, that dues go unpaid, and that young hands on the papers refuse to join. He continues: "…there is little strength in the local; it depends on persuasion, Exempt employees and non- members can put out the papers any day the Guild walks out; the Guild knows it. Guildsmen would like to be out of the union, but they haven’t enough trust in the philanthropy of management.”

A member in Providence, which has had a local for only four years, reports in a different tenor: “Guild influence here has been growing as a result of successful grievance actions. The Guild has been uniformly beneficial in economic terms: regular raises, paid overtime, holiday pay, and night differential — none of which we had before the Guild. If there has been any loss, it is in the spirit of do-or-die journalism and in management's willingness to incur expenses—for example, in paying overtime to follow a story.”

A third editorial-only Guild is in Madison, Wiscon- sin, where one paper is organized and the other has had no Guild since 1940. The correspondent, not a member, writes: “Newsmen on the Capital Times think well of the Guild. They work for a strong-willed publisher, and it allows them to stand up to him They view the Guild as honest and well-run.”

There were also reports from papers the Guild has never penetrated. One such is the Long Island tabloid, Newsday, where wages have stayed competitive with Guild levels in New York City. The situation in Louis- ville is similar: “The working climate, the attitude of management, and the wages are too good for the Summer, 1963 3