[As you can see from the front page of this issue, large sections are unreadable. The Wilmington Dispatch is using nonunion employees to continue publishing the newspaper.]
…room and imported the notorious scab herder, J.A. Turner, from Macon, Ga., and placed him in charge of the mechanical department. Turner recently was machinist instructor at the Georgia-Alabama Industrial school, better known as the Macon linotype school, and upon arrival in Wilmington stated to the organizer of the Typographical Union that the Macon school had given so many of its students a raw deal that he (Turner) quit them.
Turner was accompanied to Wilmington by five former students of the Macon school, some of them still in their teens, but he did not state whether or not these beginners were given a raw deal by the Macon school or that he inveigled them to abandon their studies at the school to join his herd and come to Wilmington to supplant journeymen printers on the Dispatch.
In other words the “open shop” declaration of the Dispatch means:
It has closed its doors to Union men and shall attempt to produce its paper with inefficient, unexperienced boys.
It has locked out its journeymen printers who were working under the lowest wage scale in North Carolina after the management stated to the officers of the Union that they realized competent printers could not be had for the figure in the wage scale.
It is attempting to give the people of Wilmington an object of ridicule and an unreliable source of information and call it a newspaper.
We suggest that, along with its change of policy, the Dispatch change its title to the “Wilmington Disgrace,” in order to distinguish it from its morning contemporary, The Morning Star, which is a newsy newspaper and a credit to eastern North Carolina and manned from garret to cellar by Union men.
The fatal step of the Dispatch was no surprise to the Typographical Union, whose international representative has been on the ground for the past week negotiating with the management of the Wilmington Dispatch, Messrs. Cruickshank and Smith, and offering every inducement possible to prevent the Dispatch from yielding to temptation to employ “cheap labor” to be furnished by Buccaneer J.A. Turner, who, no doubt with a magical wand, was supposed to learn a boy the printing business in six months.
The surprise we feel is that the Dispatch, under its pennywise-pound-foolish management, has been able to pay for any sort of labor. No doubt there has been a merry fight going on between the stockholders and the management of the Dispatch, and perhaps the buck has been repeatedly passed to the Typographical Union by the management as an excuse for their shortcomings in not being able to make ends meet. Blaming the unions for mismanagement of newspapers is not an uncommon form of indoor sport.
The management of the Dispatch states that, IN THEIR OPINION, operating with a contract with the Union is very unsatisfactory. Of course that is a matter of opinion.
Eighty-five per cent of the newspapers of the country are operating with contracts with the Typographical Union, naturally. There is nothing the matter with the Union nor the newspapers operating under its contracts. The Dispatch Is not included in the 85 nor the 15 per cent when referring to union and non-union newspapers. The question then comes up as to whether the Dispatch is really a newspaper. We leave it to the people of Wilmington.
If the Dispatch wishes to go into the hands of a receiver, let them do the graceful thing and so state it to the public and relieve the Union of the odium of closing up their paper. The “open shop” is not the solution for recovering the $15,000, the property of the present manager, which the erstwhile Carver, former president and editor, was accused of “sinking.”
. . . .
From the front page of The Union Labor Record, Wilmington, N.C., Oct. 29, 1922
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