The Post's pressmen's strike

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, 2001 - If there was a time when what the Post thought it was became submerged in what it was truly becoming, it may have been October 1975 when the paper's pressmen went on strike to save their livelihoods. The day after Katherine Graham's death, Robert Kaiser wrote:

[The strike] began before dawn on Oct. 1, 1975, when members of the union vandalized the pressroom, tried to set it on fire and beat up a night foreman, sending him to the hospital for a dozen stitches above one eye. That was the beginning of a strike that lasted 4 1/2 months and changed the course of history -- for The Post, and for the American newspaper business. It's hard to remember now that before the pressmen's strike, trade unions held positions of enormous power in most of America's big newspapers. At The Post the unions effectively managed the factory, deciding who would work what shifts, and negotiating extravagant manning arrangements. For example, Post printers routinely set "bogus" type that would never appear in the paper, and got paid for it. Long newspaper strikes hit many big cities, decimating local commerce for weeks and sometimes months . . . During Watergate Mrs. Graham's job was simply to support her troops. In the Pentagon Papers case she made a huge decision, but it came and went in a flash. In the strike she alone was the responsible executive, and for nearly five months she anxiously second-guessed herself and agonized about the outcome. The agony was visible to those who saw her regularly during the strike. She thought, and talked, and worried about it constantly. Many of her best friends -- including lawyer Edward Bennett Williams -- told her to back down and make a deal. She refused. Ultimately The Post made a final offer that the pressmen rejected, and the paper began to hire replacement workers. In a confidential conversation, George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO, asked Mrs. Graham what she would have done if the pressmen had accepted that final offer. "Slit my throat," she replied . . . In her memoir Mrs. Graham devoted nearly 70 pages to the strike, and 45 pages to Watergate. She understood the strike as the great test of her business career, and felt she handled it correctly, so it became not only a victory over the pressmen but over her own sense of inadequacy as well. Before the strike The Post had never been highly profitable, but afterward -- and especially after the Washington Star folded in 1981 -- profits soared. Unions at The Post and at other papers began to shy away from confrontations with newspapers they now knew could publish without them, and the world began to change."

In fact, the Post company had made profits of $24 million in 1974, $11 million of that coming from the paper - a 9% return, down from 15% the year before. But Kaiser is right about one thing: after the strike the world for labor at the Post and other papers certainly changed. Graham's greatest contribution to journalism was not Watergate or even the Pentagon Papers, but being the first publisher to successfully whip the unions. Labor in the news business never recovered and journalism became just another corporate occupation.

In 1975, your editor wrote:

"The Post Newspaper Guild unit, which apparently conducts its union business the way it writes its pieces, declined to go along with the strike. It was appalled by the destruction of the presses; it felt that supporting the strike would be condoning the raid on the pressroom (The liberal mind fears condoning untoward behavior worse than death, taxes, or whatever it was that led to the untoward behavior).

"By finding shelter in specific virtue, it happily avoided coming to grips with the possibility that there might be things not to condone on both sides, as generally is the case in life, and that a moral end is hard to reach by the simple expedient of finding one thing wrong and hanging your whole case on your antagonism to it." Post reporters, of all people, should understand that. They publicize, condone, and consort socially with a collection of public officials ranging from CIA murderers to penny-ante grafters without so much as a flicker of indignation, at least until the indictments are in the wind. By comparison with these crooks, publicly-subsidized malingers, liars, baby-burners, village-bombers, indolent drunks, assassins of foreign (and perhaps domestic) heads of state, legislative flim flam artists, budgetary conmen, influence peddlers, and siphoners of the treasury, the one-time arsonist in the pressroom appears a relatively benign character as Washington news subjects go . . .

"The truth is that the Post believes in selective pacifism; it believes that those to whom it is opposed should not engage in it while it is quite acceptable for violence to be carried out in order to shore up the system, state, or individuals whom it supports . . . It believes violence should be the province of the powerful. Everyone else should be a Quaker" . . .

"When you came right down to it, there were surprisingly few reasons to spring to the Post's defense. Memories of Watergate are already fading and we are left with the old Post, the new Post, the evermore the same Post: arrogant, distant, unhumanlike advocate of abstract humanism. When it was said in passing to a Star reporter how strange it was that the Post seemed to have such few friends, he shrugged his shoulders and asked, "Why? Who have they been friends to?" And that is what must, or at least should, hurt on 15th Street. The Post may win this battle. All by itself."