Press: Guild

Before the American Newspaper Guild came into being, reporters and editors took what pay they could get and envied the higher wages of printers and pressmen. Most of them still do, but in the past four years 107 daily newspapers have been forced to sign Guild contracts or to post pledges of minimum wages & hours. To make these gains, the Guild has had to organize 15,000 editorial and business office workers, finance 17 strikes. Present effort of the C. I. O. Guild is twofold: 1) unionization of all except A. F. of L. mechanical department workers, and 2) universal acceptance of the Guild shop, a condition it has been able to impose in only 20 of its 74 signed contracts.

Last week the Guild's most persistent critic and its largest champion met head-on in public debate in Manhattan. Before a hostile crowd of 700, mostly Manhattan Guildsmen, up stood Brooklyn-born Arthur T. Robb, editor of Editor & Publisher, conservative journal of the trade. His opponent: mountainous Columnist Heywood Broun, national Guild president. The clash was advertised as the press debate of the year, but the forensics fizzled, for Mr. Robb spoke from a fact-jammed cranium, while Mr. Broun replied from an overstuffed heart.

Both agreed that working newspapermen must organize, but that agreement did not soften Mr. Robb's criticism of the Guild's "cockeyed"' tactics. He warned the Guild it was making "slow progress" because: 1) it "gives more thought to antagonizing publishers than it doe.s toward promotion of the objects for which it was formed"; 2) it "attempts to discredit all advertising" and boycotts circulation of struck papers; 3) its Guild shop makes "the possession of a Guild card the prime requisite to a man's right to work on a newspaper—more important than character . . . and ability"; 4) it thinks it can "guarantee job security ... a fraud and a sham"; 5) "the common desire for more pay is not enough" to hold a vertical newspaper union together.

To which Mr. Broun rebutted: 1) the publishers' attitude "made the Guild";

2) a powerful trade union is succeeding where semiprofessional groups have failed;

3) "the Guild has not gone far enough in fighting for the Guild shop. We cannot exist half slave and half free"; 4) workers in all departments of a newspaper are so mutually dependent upon its success that they can all profit only by one big union.

Almost as Mr. Broun spoke, in San Francisco, only metropolis where all daily newspapers have a city-wide Guild contract, publishers abruptly ended prolonged negotiations for a new contract. Having gained important wage & hour concessions, the Guild voted 243-to-22 to accept a new agreement shorn of "Guild shop" and "preferential hiring of Guildsmen" clauses. Meanwhile, in Duluth, the Ridder Bros, papers (Herald and News-Tribune) completed their first week of suspension, with printers refusing to go through a Guild picket line. The Guildsmen. 93 in all, struck when the publishers turned down a 24-hour demand to accept a Guild-shop clause.