Word: guilds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...your piece on the American Newspaper Guild convention [July 6], you point a finger of criticism at the Guild's failure to 1) fully organize its field (contracts with only 176 out of 1,750 U.S. dailies) and 2) raise the standards of journalism ("Hardly a word was heard about perfecting the reporter's craft"). As to these sharp critiques we have no bone to pick, but while you are generally correct, you missed a major point in giving the reason for all this...
...C.I.O. Born in 1933 on a wave of city-room salary slashes, the Guild was nursed through infancy by its fat and rumpled creator, the late famed Scripps-Howard columnist, Heywood Broun. It took plenty of nursing. Fledgling chapters had a distressing tendency to melt under pressure: during a 1935 strike against the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Guild membership on the 84-man news staff dwindled from 39 to 24. At first the newsmen resisted joining a national labor movement sponsored by common laborers, but within four years the Guild affiliated with John L. Lewis' new Committee for Industrial Organization...
...move put an end to the Guild as a craft union of working newsmen, but it did provide some desperately needed muscle. In 1937 it boldly engineered nine strikes, called twelve more in 1938. It wrote its first national contract (with the United Press) in 1938, and by 1941 had pushed membership past 16,000. It also ended one of the sorriest chapters in Guild history: domination by Communist sympathizers. Attracted by the Guild's obvious potential, Red-liners moved in soon after its formation, eventually controlled the national offices. After a bitter fight in 1941, anti-Communists forced...
...Pains of Success. In some respects, success has proved more unsettling than growing pains. Triumphant in its drive for wages, the Guild today is a crusader lacking a crusade. Membership tends to be listless: last year the Portland (Ore.) local lowered its attendance quorum to 10% to get legislation out of indefinite hock. In the last twelve years the Guild has added only 6,560 new members, has made little or no effort to plaster the gaping holes in its ranks, e.g., such traditional holdouts as the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Milwaukee Journal, the Detroit News...
...labor leaders, including one by Francis G. Barrett, New York local president of the International Typographical Union, urging one big union for all newspaper employees-editorial, mechanical, printing, etc. But hardly a word was heard about perfecting the reporter's craft, a function in which the American Newspaper Guild, its constitution notwithstanding, has in a quarter-century betrayed no sustaining interest...