Costly Settlement

The talks at the Commodore Hotel had dragged on since noon with no visible progress, and as the clock struck midnight. New York's newspaper strike slipped into its fourth month. Then, with surprising suddenness, the deadlock was broken.

Mayor Robert F. Wagner suggested a settlement and asked both sides to act on it. At 1:45 a.m., publishers of eight silenced dailies announced their acceptance. After some arm-twisting by fellow union leaders, Bertram Powers, boss of the Typographical Union's "Big 6'' local, followed suit, said he would advise his 3,000 members to ratify the agreement this week. Waiting for the union vote, and for the negotiators to translate the broad agreement on general principles into a specific contract, the newspapers probably will not resume publishing until next week.

A Dainty Dish. "We set before their majesties a dainty dish, which proved irresistible," said tired Ted Kheel, special assistant to the mayor, and the man who drafted the wording of the settlement. "It had just the right mixture of sweets and spices suitable for both palates." Up to a point, Kheel was right. But neither side was perfectly happy.

It was "a costly settlement," said Negotiator Amory H. Bradford, vice president of the Times, "but one acceptable to the publishers." The pact will add $18.5 million to the newspapers' expenses over the next two years--and may well force the morning papers to raise their price to a dime. But it was far less expensive than it might have been. Powers went into the strike demanding a $37-a-week package increase, wound up with $12.50--including $8 in wages. And while Powers had insisted that his chief concern was not money but three matters of "principle," he got all that he wanted on only one of those principles. The three:

sbSHORTER WORK WEEK. The publishers readily agreed to reduce the work week from 36 1/4-hours to 35, since the printers really will be putting in the same amount of time on the job. They will give up half of their daily 30-minute "wash" periods to make up the difference, but they do stand to earn more overtime.

sbAUTOMATION. The publishers agreed in principle to share with the printers part of the savings they will effect by introducing automatic typesetting equipment for stock market tables. The publishers thus established their right to bring more automated gear into their shops, and the printers reluctantly agreed that an arbitrator may be called in to determine their share of the benefits from the in creased productivity.

sbCONTRACT EXPIRATION. This is the point that Powers last month called the most important of all, "the key to our future." In the past, the New York Newspaper Guild set wage patterns because its contract expired first. Now Powers and the publishers have agreed that all union contracts should expire at the same time--giving the I.T.U. greater leverage. But the expiration date is to be two years from the day the new contract is signed, not the date the unions wanted--Oct. 31, 1964, the eve of a presidential election. Another problem: since the Guild already has a contract that lapses on Oct. 31, 1964, the publishers will have to negotiate a new expiration date, and the Guild will certainly demand something in return for its cooperation. The pot sweetener could be the difference between the $8.50 contract the Guild signed last fall and the $12.50 that the I.T.U. will now be getting, or it could be an industry-wide contract, with benefits comparable to the I.T.U.'s, instead of pacts with individual papers.

Nobody Wins. Though the mailers' and stereotypers' unions were on strike along with the I.T.U., all three were expected to ratify the new contracts and withdraw their pickets. Once that happens, the presses that churn out 5,780,000 newspapers a day will roll once more. Over at Dorothy Schiff's Post, the presses had been going at top speed since the beginning of the week. Fed up with the impasse in negotiations, Dolly Schiff quit the Publishers Association and announced that her paper--one of five that closed voluntarily when the I.T.U. struck four others --would begin publishing again. Though the Post was not a bit more distinguished than ever, its circulation, normally the most anemic among Manhattan's seven general dailies, shot up from 327,000 to 600,000. But nobody, not even Dolly, could expect it to stay there when the competition returned.

By using stolid persistence to keep the strike-weary printers and publishers at the negotiating table. Mayor Wagner won some badly needed prestige. And he capitalized on it by hurrying right over to the NBC television studios to discuss the settlement on Today. Bert Powers, on the other hand, lost much of whatever status he had. He irked union leaders by balking at the mayor's terms, prompted one of the principals in the talks to comment: "He almost snatched defeat from the jaws of victory." Only when Electrical Workers Union President Harry van Arsdale stepped in and told Powers. '"You got everything you want, Bert," did he finally give in.

The printers--and 17,000 other newspaper employees--have already lost 13 weeks' pay to win a wage boost that is little more than what they could have got last December. "It will take them years to make up their lost income," said one publisher. Added Director Walter Thayer of the Herald Tribune: "This is not the kind of thing where anybody wins."

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