Fallout from a Strike

The effects of New York's 114-day newspaper strike, longest in the city's history, linger on. Last week: -- The U.S. Court of Appeals upheld the right of the Publishers Association of New York to shut down all papers if any one is struck. The publishers' move had been challenged by Local No. 6 of the New York Mailers Union, on the grounds that its members were not a party to the strike and that they had been locked out of their jobs. But the Appeals court, affirming an earlier National Labor Relations Board ruling, found such defensive lockouts perfectly legal.

-- Hearst's tabloid Mirror, first casualty of the strike, released figures that added up to a graphic explanation of how the long, enforced silence had hastened the paper's end. The Mirror was already in distressing shape when the strike began; its last profit--$389,000

--was in 1955, and it had lost $8,400,000 between 1955 and 1962. Then the strike just about swamped it in red ink. In nine months last year, the Mirror dropped $2,500,000, and stopped publishing in October.

-- Frederick J. Rogoish, from the Business Office of the New York Times, brought suit against the American Newspaper Guild to force it to recover strike-benefit payments. Rogoish argues that the Guild did not call the strike (it was led by typographers), and thus had no right to authorize strike benefits for idled Guildsmen--or to make him help support them with deductions from his paycheck. -- Even though current contracts do not expire until March 1965, New York's Mayor Robert Wagner exhorted both publishers and union leaders to get together next week in an effort to avert another disastrous strike. The mayor's impatience was understandable. He has been vainly seeking to arrange just such a peace parley ever since the strike ended last March.

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