Personal History (96 page)

I was fascinated by this man. Shortly after our meeting, I wrote to Bob Abboud, then with First National Bank in Chicago and a fellow trustee of the University of Chicago, and also one of those who had been warning me away from Warren:

There followed a getting-to-know-you period with Warren, during which we began a correspondence—always encouraging and invariably instructive—that has continued to this day. He told me that our meeting had deepened his feelings about
The Washington Post
as his “favorite investment.” He consistently renewed the promise of recognition someday
by the stock market, saying that he knew it must be “discouraging to management to have poured the efforts that you have into profit improvement—with terrific results and an obvious momentum which promises more to come—only to be greeted with a big yawn in the stock market. It won’t be permanent.”

Warren wrote me, too, about Don Graham, who had been with me in Los Angeles when Warren and I first met:

Warren’s confidence in the company was obvious, since all the while he was buying more stock himself. By September 1973, he had around 410,000 shares, worth more than $9 million.

M
Y BIGGEST WORRIES
had to do with the
Post
, where management issues and labor problems most interrelated. Production was still a mess, and the unions were at war with us about who was going to run the building, since they knew only too well the nature of our weaknesses and their strengths. Our production problems went back so many years and involved so many people and circumstances that it was difficult even to explain them, much less solve them.

Big-city papers, with only a few exceptions, were heavily unionized. We had thirteen unions at the
Post
. Different blue-collar ones dominated the “crafts”—printers, pressmen, photoengravers, stereotypers, mailers, machinists, paper-handlers, and so on. The largest of the crafts was the printers, or typesetters, represented by the International Typographical Union. Most of our labor troubles, and certainly our greatest expenses, were centered on the composing room, where the printers worked. As early as the mid-1960s, the printers had begun slowdowns, which increased in number and intensity into the early 1970s, especially at contract time. Slowing down was a belligerent action by which the printers purposely delayed the paper in any number of ways: by setting type at a snail’s pace, dropping whole set pages on the floor, inserting obscene or anti-management messages in the middle of the classified ads or anywhere else, and generally conducting a kind of guerrilla warfare against the management and the editors, who had to go down to the fourth floor—the printers’ turf—to make up pages. If the printers slowed down, the presses ran
late and readers got their
Posts
late—sometimes very late. The slowdowns were aimed directly at our circulation, at a time of intense competition.

Because the
Post
was growing and trying to get ahead of the
Star
throughout this time, we had put up with these slowdowns to a degree that was extremely shortsighted. During the 1960s, union incomes at the
Post
had risen greatly, through wage increases and huge overtime pay, which put additional pressures on the whole collective-bargaining process.

We had negotiated an amazingly lucrative contract with the printers that included a category called “reproduce.” In those days, advertising arrived from most large national advertisers already set; the paper received a kind of mat, a cylindrical cardboard from which a lead plate could be made. Unfortunately for us, however, a decades-old clause in the union contract decreed that the type had to be reset by our printers, proofed, corrected, and reprinted. Hard as it is to believe, this would happen, and then the whole redone thing would be thrown away. These pages had accumulated exponentially, since no one had the time or inclination to do this silly work. It was correctly named “reproduce” or “bogus,” and was referred to as accumulating “on the hook.”

Naturally the union fiercely resisted letting us set up a plan to deal with this and refused to let us buy out this “bogus,” because it gave them control of the composing room and meant that we had to hire
any
printer, no matter how many, who showed up and wanted a job—on the theory that there was work to do. This was their gravy train, their guarantee of jobs forever. As long as we had reproduce on the hook waiting to be set, any printer could arrive at the
Post
and declare he was going to work for us. We could do nothing to stop the influx of unneeded typesetters and had scores of these printers who just stood around and drank or played the numbers. One man went around all day sucking an orange—full of vodka. Another regularly wore a Nazi uniform to work. Morale in the composing room was terrible, and performance was even worse. There were many printers who cared about their craft and about the
Post
, but things had clearly gotten out of hand, and putting the paper out was a vastly onerous task undertaken largely by a saint, Neil Greenwald, an assistant production manager, and a composing-room foreman, Earnie Smith, who was both tough and able but was hated by the union.

Worst of all, when the
Star
bought the
Daily News
in 1972, four hundred printers came over to the
Post
, demanding work, which they got because of the reproduce clause. Overnight we went from four hundred to eight hundred printers.

There is no question that we had run the composing room badly, but we were coming into an age when the industry was in midpassage between one technology and another. Specifically, we were in a state of transition
from hot type to cold type, or photo composition. Hot-metal printing was a direct descendant of the techniques Ben Franklin had used to set
Poor Richard’s Almanack
in the eighteenth century. But whereas Ben put his raised letters together one at a time, our printers used Linotype machines, a wondrous late-nineteenth-century invention now on its last legs. Hitting keys on a complex keyboard, the printer assembled letter-molds into a line of type—hot lead poured into the molds to form the line. The stories were proofread, and when corrections were needed, individual lines had to be replaced one at a time—a spectacularly labor-intensive process. As long as this system was in place, it was impossible to function during a strike, because the whole process of setting type with hot metal was so complex. The arrival of computers and photocomposition, which set type about 150 times faster than the old way, made it possible to set type automatically, thus making the whole process simpler, safer, and less costly. Now management could run production without the craft unions in case of a strike. The balance of power was shifting. It was the heavily unionized big-city papers, however, that found it the hardest to convert to cold type, because the typographical union, stronger on large papers, resisted the change, knowing what it portended for them.

So the problem of what to do about the thousands of pages of reproduce haunted us. Most of the debate about it focused on the question of whether we should eliminate the backlog by making a one-time payment to the union or by finally setting it. Of the Washington papers, the
Post
had the most substantial backlog of reproduce by far; dating from 1962, it had accumulated to more than twenty-two thousand pages. The
Star
had only 580 pages of backlog. In 1971, the three Washington newspapers—the
Post
, the
Star
, and the
Daily News
—had proposed to buy the backlog for nearly $1.7 million, the
Post
offering to pay $1.5 million of it, or nearly $70 per page. When the union turned down this offer, we actually set up a separate room to try to work through the enormous backlog, but it kept pouring in. The printers, of course, had no incentive to work through it.

Though the printers remained our principal problem and the main focus of our attention, we were having a difficult time with other unions as well. The pressmen were a tough, blue-collar union, all white (with one exception), and all male. The union had obtained overtime provisions that enabled the pressmen to get large salaries, especially when they purposely delayed the pressruns by sabotage of one sort or another—throwing tiny darts into the newsprint, breaking it, and causing delays while rewebbing the press. Sometimes they left the presses running with only a handful of men in attendance while the rest took naps, went out for drinks, or even worked at the
Star
. Yet pressmen’s income at the
Post
had more than doubled in ten years, and our wage scales were the highest—or, in some crafts,
next to the highest (after New York City newspapers)—in the country, with liberal fringe benefits. Overtime was a large proportion of all the wages we paid, and was growing.

Again, as with the printers, there were many good, hardworking pressmen, but the
Post
’s pressroom was overmanned, and the union had been infiltrated by thugs who had arrived from cities like Newark and New Haven and Kansas City, where the papers had been on strike and the pressmen had been replaced by nonunion people. Our contract gave the
Post
little discretion over whom we hired—so on they came. They had come to cash in on the rich provisions of our contract, and unfortunately, they began to gain control of the union.

The pressmen were led by Jim Dugan, a tough, able leader in the early days, whose sense of his power had no doubt been inflated by previous wins in contract negotiations—not to speak of the consistent small wins whenever minor altercations took place. The little deals got made by
Post
managers with union officials at the water cooler, with winks, nods, and handshakes on the side. Our record of giving in was so extensive and so bad that Dugan was always confident that the pressmen could keep what they had got from management over the years, and get still more. Our pressroom had gone from bad to worse under his strong influence and because of our weak responses. Why did we give in time and again? Because the need to get tomorrow’s paper printed, not to lose competitive ground to the
Star
, was always so great. Dugan had no reason to think our weakness wouldn’t last forever. Clearly we were not headed down an easy path.

The stereotypers, who cast the metal plates that fit on the presses, formed a separate blue-collar, all-white, and all-male union, and they were very concerned that their skill would no longer be needed by papers going to photocomposition or cold type, and plastic plates. The stereotypers were led by Charlie Davis, a rough, unbending character, and they aligned themselves with the pressmen, later becoming affiliated with that union.

Oddly, both Dugan and Davis were sort of friends of mine. In many ways, I think, we were misled by them—or at least I was. In walking around the building, I would talk with both of them. They could be charming, friendly, and funny, and they communicated with us much of the time. But neither Charlie Davis nor his friend Jim Dugan meant us any good.

Throughout the production areas of the
Post
, we were trying to encourage our supervisors, whose positions were complicated because they were also members of the union, to manage. The unions resisted more and more. When Jim Cooper arrived in 1972, many of the unions seemed to view his coming as an act of war on the part of management. The pressmen stopped the presses if Jim, or indeed anyone from management, entered the pressroom. Hard to believe—but true.

The Newspaper Guild had been at the paper since 1936. Its local group was the white-collar union that oversaw all the rest of the building. It was one of the largest and strongest unions in the building, representing a wide range of people from the highest-paid reporters and editors and ad salesmen down to clerks, circulation and classified personnel, programmer analysts, and people in a department then called “detail,” who collected ads and brought them back and forth to be set and proofed. These subgroups, each with widely diverse interests, were all represented at the same table. Worse still, they were represented in negotiations by union executives from outside the building whose interests lay in getting the biggest settlement in the country and who, at that time, cared little about the specific concerns of people at the
Post
.

The
Post
’s unit of the guild had the highest or second-highest pay scale in the country and was confined by ridiculously restrictive rules. It was also almost impossible for us to fire someone short of proven lying, cheating, or stealing—and even then it wasn’t easy. Just plain incompetence was not a valid reason, much less mediocrity or laziness. In one instance, a women’s-page reporter, under time pressure to leave on vacation, plagiarized her article, lifting an entire story from a Fine Arts Commission publication. We tried to fire her, but the guild took the case to arbitration, claiming that this was a common practice. After a long hearing, we actually were able to let her go, but this example shows the lengths to which we had to go, even in the face of proven, flagrant violations. At this time the guild was led by Brian Flores, who consistently asked for—and received—big and unprecedented increases in salaries and benefits over a period of years.

On the management side, we were hopelessly bad at dealing with the guild. At one point in the fall of 1971, after the guild contract had expired, there were endless meetings at which Fritz and Paul Ignatius and I would talk with Jim Daly, who was ostensibly running the negotiations, about some far-reaching proposals he wanted to make. There were others present also, and everyone felt free to chip in and offer suggestions. The whole process had become a kind of endless free-for-all. I believe the one person not there was Larry Kennelly, the actual negotiator with the guild.