Word: pressmen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...cocktails, conversation and shoddy (hurried?) printing make this a must for compositors, pressmen and proofreaders...
Last summer, when Detroit's pressmen walked off the city's two papers, the Free Press and the News, one of the more interested observers was a 23-year-old graduate student in economics at Detroit's Wayne State University. Michael Gordon Dworkin's journalistic experience was meager; in years past he had logged a little time on Wayne State's student paper, the Daily Collegian. But he did not lack for nerve. If the shutdown lasted long enough, he decided, an interim daily might make its publisher some real money. On the strength...
Curiously enough, it was another intervening labor leader, United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther, who broke the deadlock. Apparently looking for a way out of the trap his own stubbornness had sprung, the pressmen's Frazee paid a clandestine visit to Reuther at the U.A.W.'s Solidarity House and humbly asked for help. "I'll make a compromise proposal," Reuther said, "but I won't argue." Within a day, both the papers and Frazee's pressmen accepted the terms...
Reuther's proposals ironed out the remaining issue between the two sides: whether to operate new high-speed presses with 15-man or 16-man crews. For one year, proposed the U.A.W. chief, the presses will run with 16-man crews. Then, unless the pressmen agree to submit the issue to binding arbitration, the 16th man will be dropped...
Since this was almost exactly what the papers had asked for, what had Frazee's strike accomplished? When the papers get back into business this week, his pressmen will be getting substantially the same contract terms that all but one of the other unions agreed upon before the strike began. And since Frazee had already given in on all other demands, his prolonged intransigence netted the pressmen little more than the right to claim that they had spun out the city's ninth newspaper shutdown in nine years to a record 131 days...