Frustrating the Unions

Boards cover every street-level window in the four-story building. Armed Pinkerton men guard every entrance. A 12-ft.-high fence has been thrown up around the parking lots. Two police cars stand by in case of trouble. Guards check the passes of everyone entering and leaving the building. No one goes out for lunch; sandwiches are brought in by an industrial caterer.

The plant of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which has now been struck for eleven weeks, is virtually under siege. With a determination rarely displayed these days by a publisher confronted with a strike, George R. Hearst Jr., grandson of William Randolph, has struggled to continue publishing his afternoon paper. It has missed only two days since the strike began. Though its circulation has dropped from 726,000 to 500,000 and it prints two editions instead of six, it continues to reach the streets and subscribers with its usual heavy load of columnists, features and wire-service copy. Ads are running about 60% of normal.

Promise of Seniority. To replace the 2,000 employees on strike, Hearst has hired 1,200 non-union personnel. Some are professional strikebreakers who travel from one struck paper to the next. But most of them come from suburban papers around Los Angeles, and they aim to stay on. They have been promised that they can keep their jobs when the strike is ended and that they will even have seniority over the strikers. "I don't like being called a strikebreaker," says a 26-year-old reporter who is making $54 more a week at the Examiner than he did on his suburban paper. "I'm a liberal and a Democrat. But I decided I had to get some experience on a metropolitan newspaper if I'm ever going to make it as a journalist. This was my first good chance."

Within the plant, Hearst has maintained a high degree of efficiency. Management, of course, is still on the job, as are eleven top editors and reporters who are under personal contract to the paper. There are no longer any time-wasting jurisdictional disputes, because there are no more jurisdictions. Printers help out stereotypers, stereotypers assist pressmen, pressmen lend the mailers a hand. Even reporters are called on to run copy and dirty their hands in the back shop. Hearst himself is in and out of the newsroom and the pressroom, sometimes answering the telephone or composing type. "He seems real happy with the job we're doing," says a reporter.

The unions are not. They are, in fact, a study in furious frustration. They promoted a boycott of the paper's advertisers, but with little success. A Hearst strike in San Francisco, supported by Los Angeles pickets, was settled last week. The unions claim that they cannot get management to negotiate. Their picketing has proved ineffectual, even when it was reinforced by occasional mob scenes in front of the Examiner. Non-union people were beaten up, windows smashed. But the police have cleared the area of all but the legal number of pickets. The best the unions can do is photograph every person who leaves the building, for a growing file on strikebreakers. Even the Teamsters have not been able to cause much trouble because Hearst has hired non-union drivers to deliver the paper.

$10,000 Reward. The worst violence to date occurred last month when two non-union printers were shot in a Los Angeles motel; one died recently. Police have not traced the crime to the unions, but the Examiner had no doubts. In a front-page editorial, the paper put the blame squarely on the strikers. "This cold-blooded murder," said the paper, "heads a long list of crimes and violence since eleven trade unions went on strike." The paper then proceeded to list 150 incidents. "The Herald-Examiner," concluded the editorial, "will not be moved by intimidation." The paper offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the printer's assailant.

The unions demanded that Hearst give them space to reply, but he would not even let them pay for an ad. An air of gloom has settled on strike headquarters, two blocks from the Examiner. The unions are convinced that Hearst means to break them once and for all; the city's other daily, the Los Angeles Times, has no unions. "I wish I could see the end in sight," says Robert Rupert, international representative of the American Newspaper Guild. "But there's been no progress. I go into each negotiating session with the hope that we can discuss the issues, but management just won't talk. It turns into a monologue with me doing the talking and them just sitting there."

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