TYPE HIGH !!!

I’m not against unions. No way. I am acutely aware that some employers out there would happily take us back to the Nineteenth Century: 60 or 70 hour weeks (on “salary”), 40 hours pay, no breaks or health insurance, and lots of take home work.
One of the only things that stops them is their fear of unionization. Like the notion of a “fleet in being” (for instance, Hitler’s battleships which kept the British Navy pinned down throughout World War II without firing a shot) the mere fact that unions exist protects all of us.
It’s just that, unfortunately, the long “cold—and sometimes hot—war” between employer and union sometimes damages employee welfare more than it helps. This becomes especially true when technology changes or a new source of competition arises.
The union becomes rigid in its protectiveness, deaf to all pleas and explanations of new circumstances from management. The union hierarchy and its membership eventually reach the point where they will admit to no truth in any statement by the company. (Companies may have given them reason.)
This locked-in attitude that brooks no change can drive a company right off the cliff, and often, until it is too late, the union seems completely unconcerned with management’s problems. It sometimes seems as if unions forget where the money comes from that goes into a paycheck.
Somehow there doesn’t seem to be straight line in union minds running from healthy and profitable corporations to fatter paychecks, sweeter benefits and longer vacations. The idea of a related cause and effect seems to be lost on many union leaders and members.
My father got a taste of that in 1946. He was one of thousands of returning vets who worked for a large, national company. The company invited all the vets to a free week at New York City headquarters (with their families) for a reorientation to the civilian world. We went.
The company was unionized in three eastern states, but not here in Michigan. A union spokesman was given the opportunity to address all the vets, unionized or not. Dad listened to him go on and on about all the new benefits the union was going to get from the company.
“Where is the company going to get the money?” asked my stolidly Dutch father.
The man looked at my dad as if he were mentally unhinged. “We don’t care.”
Unfortunately true. Unions have for too long viewed companies as big money trees to be shaken at will. One thinks immediately of the shrinking masses of once envied auto workers who are now justly concerned that it could all go away.
For years the UAW cared as little as the fellow my dad questioned in New York. Now as GM and Chrysler veer toward the hottest circle in corporate Hell, it is almost too late for union concern to matter. There have been harbingers and hints for decades—ignored, by both management and union.
It brings to mind an experience I had back in 1960. I took a brief job in the photo morgue of the long departed “New York World, Telegram & Sun”. It was part of my job to take stock photos of politicians and celebrities downstairs to the composing room so they could be etched in lead and inserted in the newspaper.
I vividly remember the first time I walked into the composing room. First the noise: row upon row of linotype machines clattering away like machine guns as they spat out lines of lead print. Then there were the stones—the benches manned by the hugely muscled compositors.
Imagine a vast cathedral filled with newspaper page sized benches, called “stones”. Each had its own workman armed with a huge wooden mallet with which he pounded the lead type into place and then locked up the steel page frame. Then the man effortless lifted this incredibly heavy lead page and carried it to the printing presses.
This was Beowulf country. As I passed through it saw something interesting on the floor and picked it up. Oh woe. Everything stopped. One hundred angry pairs of eyes fastened upon me. One hundred mallets began to pound on the stone in wrathful rhythm. BAM! “TYPE HIGH!” BAM! “TYPE HIGH!” BAM! “TYPE HIGH!!”
I froze like a rabbit surrounded by howling wolves, transfixed. An editor in a suit and tie ran up to me and knocked the offending piece of lead from my hand. Everything stopped; everyone went back to work.
The editor explained, “You were holding a piece of lead that was type high—it was cast to go into a page and make an impression in the printer. Only a member of the compositors union may touch type high lead. Even I have to ask one of them to move a line if I want it changed.
Needless to say I never again picked up a piece of lead in that room. I found many of these incredibly strong men to be perfectly congenial as long as I behaved myself. I even went out to lunch with some and enjoyed it.
Two years later—1962—the unions struck every newspaper in New York. The cause was largely technological improvements available to newspapers that could save them large amounts of money. The unions said, NO—especially to innovations like printing without the cumbersome lead type and forms.
When the strike ended, four of New York’s “big seven” newspapers were out of print, period. The Herald Tribune was gone, so was the tabloid Daily Mirror, the Journal American and The World-Telegram & Sun. So were all the editors, writers, ad salesmen, deliverymen—and compositors.
At the surviving New York Times, Daily News and Post, there were no compositors left. Printing was done by other processes now—faster, cheaper. I have often wondered what those hundreds of compositors went on to do. They had only one skill, and it was as gone as buggy whip manufacture.
The unions had lost—by a massacre. Oh, the union in my dad’s company? It got lots of people like my dad several more benefits, more vacation, increased pay. The company is still there, worth billions and profitable. But there are very few people working for the company who hold jobs like my dad held for over thirty years. They are as gone as compositors.
Today it behooves unions to be as flexible and as nimble as the companies whose workers they represent need to be—in order to survive. (Before the specter of bankruptcy arises, well before.) Else in the words of “Romeo and Juliet’s” prince, “ALL are punished.”
As for me—as I scan today’s headlines—I hear the ghostly echo of a forgotten chant, reverberating through abandoned composing rooms, “Type high, bam, type high, bam, type high … .”