Word: pressmen
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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...
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...
...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...
...extra pay for working more than eight hours in any day, the battle lines were clearly drawn, and the unions embarked on their succession of Detroit strikes with an implacability of purpose that matched the publishers'. Three years ago, after John Knight shut the door on union pressmen in Miami, the union exported a contingent of Miami picketers to Detroit. Free Press pressmen promptly walked...
This week's strike bid fair to be both bitter and protracted. The pressmen who had walked out were not negotiating at all. The two papers, which have kept editorial hands busy at make-work, by week's end were proposing two-week vacations for all salaried employees. Said Bart Piscitello, president of the Detroit pressmen's local: "We're planning on a long strike...