Deadlock in Detroit

Last July 13, Freeman Frazee doffed thefolded paper cap that identifies the newspaper pressman and walked off his job at the Detroit Free Press. Since Frazee is president of the Detroit printing pressmen's union, he was followed by all his men, and at both the Free Press and the city's other paper, the evening News, the presses ground to a stop--silenced by Detroit's ninth newspaper strike since 1955. By last week, as the strike entered its seventh week, all Detroit was beginning to wonder whether "Smoky" Frazee could ever be talked back into his pressman's cap.

As in New York City, where Bert Powers of the International Typographical Union was able to silence Manhattan dailies for 114 days (TIME cover, ' March 1, 1963), Detroit's newspaper strike was a measure of the power of one stubborn man. Only one other union joined Frazee's walkout: the paper and plate handlers' union. The other twelve newspaper unions in Detroit, having long since signed new contracts, ; are fretting to get back to work.

Frazee is sitting tight on his insistence that Free Press pressmen get time and a half for rolling the Sunday edition. To the publishers, the demand seems ; outrageous. No morning paper in the country pays that bonus, and the morning Free Press is loath to set a precedent. The union demand is loosely based ! on what is called a "double shift," common enough on evening papers with Sunday editions, where pressmen must roll both the Saturday and the Sunday paper on the same day.

But Free Press pressmen have never had to work that double shift, and are handsomely compensated for overtime. On the day President Kennedy was assassinated and the paper called its press crew an hour early, the union demanded--and got--a full day's pay for the additional hour's work. In Detroit, the income of newspaper pressmen stands among the highest in organized labor: an average $11,400 a year.

Last week, in an effort to break the impasse, Michigan Governor George Romney invited both sides to sit down with him at the bargaining table. But Smoky was not in a negotiating mood. "Sure, it's a breakthrough," said he of his premium-pay demand. "But so were pensions a few years ago--when I got 'em here."

* A nickname Frazee earned by getting born in Pittsburgh.

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