Communists in Fleet Street

Chirped the London Daily Mirror one morning last week: HERE WE ARE AGAIN. Shouted the big, black headlines in the Daily Sketch: AT LAST IT'S OVER. READ ALL ABOUT IT. After 26 days, London's newspaper strike was settled. Queueing up at the stands, news-hungry Londoners snapped up papers so fast that the extra-heavy press runs could not keep up with the demand. Since the strike caused some 50 million readers to miss three of the most exciting events in recent British history, i.e., the change of Prime Ministers, the announcement of a general election, a cut in income taxes, the Times and Daily Telegraph put out brief supplements to tell Londoners what they had missed.

Muscle-Flexing. The strike cost Fleet Street upwards of $8,000,000, and the Star, Evening News and Evening Standard were forced to raise prices a halfpenny to recoup some of their lost revenue. It also taught British publishers a hard lesson in Communist tactics. The strike was called against all members of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association by the Communist-dominated Electrical Trades Union and the Amalgamated Engineering Union, whose London locals are also under Communist influence.

All told, only 700 electricians and engineers walked out, over demands for an $8.19 pay raise to bring their average pay to around $40 a week. The papers could have printed, but in Britain, when one union walks out, other union men would not think of breaking the strike. Thus some 23,000 printers, pressmen, etc. had no papers to put out.

But E.T.U.-A.E.U. did not strike London's Communist Daily Worker, which does not belong to the Proprietors' Association. The paper said that it would meet the E.T.U.-A.E.U. demand. However, the Worker's compositors walked out on the grounds that if the Worker could afford to boost wages of maintenance men, it could take back compositors laid off in a recent economy drive. Twelve days after the strike's beginning, the Worker settled with all its employees, and for two weeks it was London's only daily (TIME, April 18).

When Fleet Street's publishers sat down with the E.T.U.-A.E.U. to try to end the strike, they found that the union bargainers were almost all Communist Party members. While wages were an issue, there was no doubt that the Communists were taking the opportunity to flex their muscles, show the public that they could hit where it would hurt most.

"Unjustified." After the unions refused to budge from their position, a government-appointed three-man court of inquiry was called in. It found the demands "unjustified . . . unrealistic," since they would boost the unions' scale well above that of the rest of the country. But the negotiators refused to bargain. Labor Minister Sir Walter Monckton proposed that the strikers go back to work on all papers, pending a settlement, but his appeal fell on deaf ears.

In the end, it was Britain's responsible labor unions that forced an end to the strike. Twelve unions, representing out-of-work printers, pressmen, etc., asked the top-level Trades Union Congress to put a stop to the Communists, then laid down their own ultimatum: if the strikers refused to ease their demands, the printers would go back to work anyway, handle electrical and maintenance jobs themselves. At that, the strike leaders capitulated, were handed a $1.40 raise by the publishers, just about what they had been offered in the first place.

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