The Press: What Comes Naturally

• Share

In composing rooms all over the U.S., printers sat on sawed-off chairs before tinkling linotype machines and spelled out the news: their A.F.L. International Typographical Union had just thundered its answer to the Taft-Hartley law. The act had outlawed the closed-shop agreements that were the bone & sinew of the I.T.U. So the 95-year-old labor union would simply sign no more contracts. Its 1,001 locals would post unsigned "conditions of employment," and would work as long as the conditions prevailed. Any publisher who rashly tried to alter the conditions—or to hire non-union printers—would have a strike on his hands.

The Right Not to Work. The news came from Cleveland's sweltering Public Hall, where the I.T.U. last week held its 89th national convention. Mild-eyed President Woodruff Randolph,*55, laid the new policy on the line: the union would obey the letter of the law, but it would as soon give up the ghost as the closed shop it had won from the bulk of the U.S. press (some exceptions: the open-shop Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Bulletin, John H. Perry's Florida chain).

Randolph earnestly counseled "patience and more patience" to avoid strikes. He carefully coached the delegates on how to act if a strike were called: "No law says you must tell the employer why you are striking. You can strike for any reason at all, or for no reason at all. . . . We only want to do what we have been doing for more than 100 years. We can assure [employers] that we will do what comes naturally."

Life & Death. Since full and free discussion comes naturally to the I.T.U., the union's challenge will be thoroughly chewed in weeks to come by its 87,164 members. Older than most of the newspapers and printing houses it deals with, the I.T.U. is encrusted with tradition, paternalism and a certain amount of featherbedding. Almost as soon as he learns the union's rules—such as the one forbidding editors to lay a hand on type —an apprentice learns how relentlessly the I.T.U. will take care of him. In a strike, it will pay up to 60% of his wage. In old age, it will pay him a pension, or put him up at the cozy Printers' Home at Colorado Springs. When he dies, it will fork over $50 to $500 in death benefits.

That costs money. Last year the I.T.U. collected $926,278 in dues, and $6,149,257 in assessments. Zealously democratic, it is self-governed by a two-party system of "Progressives" (now in office) and "Independents." Its finances are fully reported in the monthly Typographical Journal, and its assessments may be levied only after a national referendum. (In 1940, horrified when an A.F.L. convention dared to levy an anti-C.I.O. assessment on all members, the printers refused to pay, dropped out of the federation for two years.)