Lessons of a Strike

January 26, 1959

There were many excellent recommendations in the President’s State of the Union Message, but his proposals for labor legislation failed to go to the heart of the matter. If we want a glaring example of what our present labor laws and enforcement agencies permit or encourage, we have merely to look at the recent nineteen-day New York newspaper-deliverers’ strike.

Let us recall what happened. The deliverers were getting a basic wage of $103.82 for a 40-hour week for day drivers. The publishers offered them the same package increase previously granted to the Newspaper Guild—$7 a week spread over two years, $4 the first year and $3 the second. This would have made, as of now, about $108 a week. (Average nationwide manufacturing earnings are $87 a week.)

The union leaders, after a one-day strike, accepted this offer; but the striking members themselves turned it down by a vote of 877 to 772. Thus 105 men, in effect, precipitated a strike that threw about 17,000 of the 20,000 employees of the nine New York papers out of work. In other words, each man in the plurality that voted to strike forced more than 160 others out of work. The newspapers estimated their loss in revenue at $25 million. Nearly 6 million readers were deprived of papers.

The indirect losses (even passing over those of big merchants or theaters) were incalculable. Ten thousand of the city’s 16,000 newsstands were forced to close during the strike. Candy-store sales dropped violently. People who had rooms to rent couldn’t advertise. Job hunters didn’t know where to look for work.

WHO GAINED?

Who gained by the strike? Certainly not the strikers. They lost nineteen days’ work and pay—at the Christmas season. (The strike ran from Dec. 9 to Dec. 28.) It is difficult for an outsider to see any net advantage in the contract they finally accepted over the contract they struck to reject. According to the publishers’ spokesman, they merely accepted the old offer in revised form: Instead of $4, only a $3.55 wage increase for the first year, plus Columbus Day as an additional holiday; and instead of $3, only a $1.75 increase for the second year, plus three days of paid leave for illness or other personal reasons.

Suppose the strikers, instead of buying a “paid” Columbus holiday for $23.40 (45 cents a week less, times 52 weeks) had actually gained a paid holiday net by the strike? It would still take nineteen years of such Columbus Days to make up the strike loss. Even if we accept the claim of union members that they “gained” 30 cents a week net, it will take them seven years of work to make up their average strike loss of more than $400 each. And by inflicting heavy strike losses on the newspapers, they reduced the funds available for future increases in jobs or wages.

WHAT MADE IT POSSIBLE

What made it possible for 105 men to silence the press of the greatest city in the world? This is the question the President and Congress should be asking themselves. Part of the answer is the physical intimidation or coercion the strikers were able to impose. As in 1945, they put a limit on the number of copies (five or six) that an individual was allowed to pick up at the publishing plants. The local police in effect enforced such rules. Plenty of truckers were willing, if they had been peacefully allowed to do so, to perform the functions the strikers had abandoned. Some truckers did, in fact, deliver papers all the way from Philadelphia.

What the law and law-enforcement agencies ought to have done, and should do hereafter, is clear. (1) They should forbid mass picketing, or all picketing, however ostensibly “peaceable,” that has in fact an intimidatory effect. (2) They should cease compelling an employer to negotiate with strikers. He should be free to announce that all strikers not back at work at a given time would be considered to have resigned their jobs and that others would be permanently hired in their place.

Or do we believe that a tiny but muscular minority should have the right, at will, to close down the press of a great city unless its demands are met?