COMMENT
Is a strike a disaster?
Every journalist who reads this is no doubt aware of the ill effects of the winter past in New York and Cleveland. News stories in endless number have toted up strike losses suffered by newspapers, employees, newsstand dealers, newsprint manufacturers, retail stores, used-car dealers, realtors, and florists. A few mentioned, too, that readers were without their regular papers for four months.
All that is past. Newspapers in the two cities are publishing again, and the memory of the darkest days of the blackouts recedes swiftly.
Were the strikes a total loss—a negative quantity to be entered in red ink and forgotten? The Review prefers to hope not. The months out of business and out of work, attended by uncounted personal crises, cannot be recovered. Yet there are intangibles emerging from the strikes that may ultimately help the newspaper business enter a more peaceful, more rational era. Among such can be noted:
- A widespread sense that the truisms of economic conflict were found wanting. The ultimate weapons of labor and management—the strike and the shutdown—were designed to force quick capitulation. In Cleveland and New York, each side found its opponent durable, an even match. At the end, all appeared to realize the futility of surrender-or-else psychology.
- A realization that irresponsible or obstinate minorities cannot be allowed to set policy for unions or for publishers. In New York, various unions and union members found themselves morally committed to supporting demands and decisions that they had no opportunity to approve and that many disapproved. On the publishers' side, individual newspapers could exercise veto powers over decisions made, with the result that agreement was often possible only on standing pat. Since the strike, some of the participants on both sides have called for firm, responsible majority rule. Such rule may smack of monopoly, but it is preferable in any case to chaos.
- A further realization that understandings cannot be stitched together under pressure of a deadline. There is strong sentiment now, where there was little before, for national and local groups to study problems (such as automation) that have become too complicated for mere horse-trading. In other words, newspapers and unions may finally be ready to lift dealings from the level of debate to the level of factfinding and recommendation through continuing labor-management committees (as in the steel industry).
- The decline of the idea, much heard in the strike's early days, that full-scale government intervention, via new laws, would solve newspaper disputes. Most of the participants in the recent strikes have come out, soundly enough, for self-government in the newspaper business. Certainly, the hazards of the continuance (and, by implication, the discontinuance) of publication by fiat would not help a free press.
- The dawning of the idea that the interruption of publication is immoral—not because all newspapers are good newspapers, but because each incurs an obligation by availing itself of such special protection as the First Amendment. In the past, the principle of continuous publication has suffered at the hands of both unions and publishers. Even if no announced changes of tactics take place, there may in the future be greater reluctance to close or strike newspapers—or, alternatively, greater willingness to find some way to provide interim service to the public, perhaps even through some form of joint non-profit newspaper or newspapers.
All these threads are parallel, leading toward moderation, sanity, and uninterrupted service in the public interest. The progress made toward realizing such ends before the next deadlines will measure whether the strikes prove a total loss or an ultimate asset.
