Personal History (105 page)

The next day, December 4, was important because we made a final offer. To keep the whole thing from dragging on, we had decided to make what Mark called “the comprehensive, definitive and final settlement offer.” This was an offer that I believe was generous. A pressman’s base pay would have gone immediately to $17,318.60, higher than that of any pressman at any other newspaper in the United States at that time. It gave pressmen the opportunity to earn as much as the then-current average in the pressroom by working more reasonable hours (only five days a week), and more if they chose reasonable overtime. The contract would have ended the practice of back-to-back shifts. We promised job security and noted that any de-escalation in manning the presses would be by attrition, not through firings. There were other add-ons—overtime, holiday bonuses, and a $400,000 package to divide up. It was an offer the pressmen could have accepted—and would have done well to—and one that we could live with, which the final offer had to be.

There was a secret meeting on the eve of the final contract offer, but nothing happened. Dugan, as usual, was both arrogant and personal. He
called Mark Meagher and Larry Wallace liars and told them to “tell Katharine Graham … to take her contract proposal and shove it.”

We had warned the union—it wasn’t a threat or a ploy—that we thought this offer was the best we could come forward with. We re-emphasized, as we had steadfastly maintained throughout, that we considered the return to work of those pressmen who caused the destruction in our pressroom nonnegotiable and outside the bargaining process. Local 6 voted 249 to 5 to reject our offer.

Why didn’t the pressmen accept the contract? I’m sure there are as many answers as there were individual pressmen. Perhaps they were holding out, hoping we would cave in—and remembering that we always had. Jim Dugan himself was certainly a factor, as was Charlie Davis of the stereotypers, Dugan’s first henchman. Dugan had always been an able leader, but had undoubtedly gotten an inflated ego from his perceived victory over John Prescott the night of the wildcat strike in 1973. He seemed to believe that he was the strong man in the building and could always make management back down in the end. He projected the attitude that he was going to fix us, to show the management of The Washington Post Company who was really in charge. Not only would there be no concessions but, in fact, he was out to make further gains. From this the union never wavered, through the entire strike. To some extent Dugan was a prisoner—of his power and successful past and of the people who did the damage. He had to ask us to take back the men who damaged our presses. We steadfastly refused.

After the overwhelming turndown of our final offer by the union, it was a question of when, not if, to announce that we would start hiring replacement workers. This was the most sensitive and frightening moment of the whole strike. I had no idea what the reaction might be on the part of the guild, the pressmen, or the many strikers. We talked about the upcoming guild meeting and whether we should tempt fate by making our announcement just before or waiting until just after. But there was no perfect moment. Finally, Mark made the decision to move ahead as quickly as possible and set the date for the eve of a guild meeting, which worried me considerably but which proved to be a wise and gutsy judgment.

Three days after the pressmen’s union’s rejection of our final offer, December 10, Mark and I walked down to the fifth-floor newsroom, the biggest available place, to a meeting of all those still working. There I announced our intention to hire replacement workers, outlining our attempt to negotiate the terms of the final offer. I then described the alternative to not hiring new pressmen as the continued publication of the paper by an already exhausted crew for who knew how many months, emphasizing that, based on past patterns, there was no indication that ten more
weeks—or even ten more months—of bargaining would change any attitudes. Continuing to negotiate seemed likely to lead only to more sterile debate, and, as I said to someone at the time, “unjustified hopes and added delay in reaching settlements with the other unions. The truth is that as far as the pressmen are concerned, it is just too late.”

I told those gathered in the newsroom that members of Local 6 were being informed by letter that, if our contract offer was not approved by midnight of the next Sunday (four days later), we would begin hiring permanent replacements. I added that the pressmen as individuals—with the exception of those who had been known to participate in the violence—could return to their jobs in the pressroom. I also tried to speak directly to members of the other craft unions, emphasizing that we wanted to reach agreements as speedily as possible with all those unions whose contracts had expired on September 30.

I knew this action was legal but, as I told those gathered there that morning, it was more important for me to think about whether it was humanly right. In the end, I said to the gathering:

I concluded by saying:

My statement was greeted by tense silence. Mark followed up. The two of us took a few questions and then left. The next day, the
Post
ran a full-page open letter from Mark, titled “Why
The Washington Post
Has Taken Action to End the Strike and Return to Normal Operations,” which was Ted Van Dyk’s work. We also ran an ad in the classified section of the paper for “Immediate Openings” for “Experienced or Inexperienced” production personnel for the pressroom. To our amazement, early the next morning there were about seven hundred people lined up in front of the building to be interviewed. In the end, we had a thousand applicants, from whom we hired very carefully, and at first very slowly, a cross-section of people right off the street and some who had worked at the paper during the strike. Our first hire was a black man who had stood on the line in silver platform shoes dressed in a long fur coat. One of the first of the new “pressmen” was Diane Elmore (now Patterson), formerly from advertising sales, who had worked on the presses throughout the strike, liking it so much that she chose to switch jobs. She is now an assistant superintendent for the mailroom at our Springfield plant. There were several Vietnamese men who had worked around the building in various temporary capacities who were hired and became star performers.

One of the fine things Jim Cooper had done was to meet at my farm in Virginia with six of the pressroom supervisors who were union members, inviting them to return to work. They agreed to come back in, which they did only after we went to impasse and had started hiring, and eventually helped with training the new people. Their return was a great step forward for us but a difficult one for them; they were all visibly shaken, pale, and frightened in their first days back on the job.

We brought in two people to begin training our new pressmen in a rigorous two-week training program. We had to lower our standards a little to go faster, but we found such highly motivated and qualified people that they rose rapidly through the ranks. I had been concerned that there would be violent confrontations between the pickets and the applicants. To my surprise there were none. “You might have had two hundred press operators picketing out there who were fearful for their jobs,” recalled Jim Cooper later, “but you had seven hundred people—many of whom were black—out there hoping for jobs that blacks hadn’t even been allowed to think about. It would have taken a very stupid person to try to oppose them.”

Pressures rose on us after the announcement about hiring. Mark, Don, and I were called to go before the D.C. City Council to answer questions. Dugan had asked for a meeting with the council and had actually said, “I used to live in D.C., for whatever that’s worth,” to which Council Chairman Sterling Tucker had said, “That’s not worth anything.” Again the racial issue helped counteract the general pro-union sympathy,
because when we informed Tucker that there were no blacks in the union, he concluded it was a racist union and decided not to help the pressmen in any way.

The president of the Greater Washington Central Labor Council asked me to meet with Mayor Walter Washington and Jim Dugan, accusing us of importing strikebreakers. By this time we had had to borrow a few pressmen from other papers, and I explained by letter why we had had to do this, noting that we never brought in relief pressmen until we went to impasse in December, when our people were exhausted. I added that I couldn’t see that the mayor’s presence would change a situation of basic wide disagreement between the
Post
and Local 6, especially since the mediation service had participated from the beginning. There never was a meeting.

Just at this time, more than fifteen hundred demonstrators staged a rally parading past the building to show solidarity with the unions. Several of us inside the building were clustered, discreetly hidden at an upstairs window, to watch the approaching parade. I was dismayed to see Charlie Davis at the head of the group with a sign that read, in big letters, “Phil shot the wrong Graham.” I cringed and ran from the window. I couldn’t believe that Charlie and I had once been on friendly, jocular terms.

Oddly, the pressmen still didn’t seem to feel threatened—not even after our hiring began; they acted as though they believed it was only a matter of time before they’d be coming back in. In many ways, this attitude may have been a reflection of how unreal Dugan’s perspective was. From the beginning, he appeared not to think that we could actually be running the presses. Even when the picketers heard the noise of the presses, he would insist we were somehow faking it. As we got stronger and stronger, he kept denying our successes. As late as the end of December, Dugan claimed on radio and television that our statements about the
Post
’s circulation were misleading and way off base, asserting that we were dumping thousands of copies of the daily paper. In fact, by this time daily circulation was down by only about twenty-five thousand copies, and Sunday circulation by just twelve thousand. We had reached 98 percent of expectations for this time of year.

Despite their seeming to believe that time was on their side, the pressmen appealed to George Meany, AFL-CIO president, for help. He in turn called me and said, “Katharine, the pressmen have called and want me to talk to you.” I confess that my heart sank at his call. Meany could have seriously hurt us by starting boycotts and applying other political pressures—in essence, by getting behind the pressmen’s union. He asked me if I wanted him to come to the
Post
to talk. I knew Meany through my father, who had served with him on the War Labor Board. I respected him and liked him and knew that he couldn’t possibly cross the picket line, so I told
him I’d go to him, which I did on December 17, taking Mark along with me to Meany’s office, only a couple of blocks away. When we were seated, George got right down to business, asking, “Would you take the pressmen back if they paid to fix the presses?”

“No,” I replied unequivocally. “The presses are fixed. We have already hired half the people we need. It’s too late to take them back. We can’t have them working side by side with nonunion people.”

“Would you take them back if—” George kept raising the ante, in one question after another. I kept explaining that we had crossed the bridge, they hadn’t responded to any invitations to negotiate, and now we were launched on another path. Finally, he posed the ultimate difficult question: “What would you do if they accepted the contract?” Legally, of course, if they had at any time accepted the final contract, they would have been eligible for the remaining jobs. I took a deep breath, let my intuition take over, and replied, “I guess I’d slit my throat from ear to ear.”

There was a deafening silence for a moment while George stared at me and Mark went limp, looking as though he were going to slide right off the couch on which we both were sitting. But I knew George, and I thought I could level with him, and that was the truth. I also knew that he would understand what I meant; he was very political, with sensitive antennae. Finally, he reflected sadly, “Well, I offered to help the pressmen when this strike first started. I sent them a wire and they never replied. Also, I just can’t imagine people who would destroy their tools. I’ve never approved of that. That would never have happened in my day.” We talked a little longer; then Mark and I rose to leave. Meany walked with us to the elevator slowly and sorrowfully. As we were getting in, he said to me, “The
Post
is a great newspaper, and I knew and loved your father.”

J
UST BEFORE
C
HRISTMAS
, we had our first big break when the paper-handlers—who pushed the huge and heavy newsprint rolls to the presses, a job that was then being done by Don Graham, Mark Meagher, and others—settled their contract, the first union to do so. To the public, this didn’t quite count as a breakthrough, however, because the pressmen’s and other unions condescended to them. The paper-handlers, being all black and lower-skilled, were slightly different from the other crafts, but from our point of view it was a break, and it relieved us considerably.