Old skills, new settings: listening to the typesetters

Standing with drinks in hand in mediator Ted Kheel’s Manhattan apartment kitchen in 1974, Bert Powers, head of Local No. 6 of the International Typesetters Union, and the publishers of The New York Times and The New York Daily News argued over the future of the newspaper business.

Powers, described by Kheel as “honest, clean, democratic — and impossible,� had been successfully fighting the oncoming tide of “automation� for years. “When they talked of computers,� Powers later told me, “I pretended I didn’t know what they were talking about.�

He did know, though. As Time magazine had reported a decade earlier, “Economy-minded newspaper publishers have long nourished a dollar-saving daydream. In their profit-filled reveries automatic machines turn reporters’ edited copy directly into metal type: no high-salaried typesetters intervene.� At the Los Angeles Times and the Palm Beach Post-Times, early-generation computers ran machinery that could produce what were called “justified lines� of type at a far faster rate than the typographers. At the publishers’ behest, Kheel and Powers had taken a trip to Palm Beach to see the latter paper in operation.

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Powers had led the longest and most devastating strike in newspaper history, in 1962, and ever since had been fighting rear guard actions. In 1974, when push came to shove, Powers made a historic deal. In response to gentle prodding by Kheel, the union boss gave the newspapers the green light — the ability to completely computerize their typesetting operations — in exchange for jobs for his current union members that would cover them for a decade, until most were age 55 or older, eligible for pensions. The publishers were happy, for without that green light their papers might have folded.

The surviving typesetters stayed at the Times, the Daily News and the Post, playing pinochle and bridge in back rooms while collecting their salaries. But Bert’s membership rolls dropped from thousands to a few hundred, and the ranks of the unemployed typesetters swelled. Bert and I would have lunch and discuss their possibilities. “They’re smart guys,� I would say. “Retrain them.� “As what?� he would retort, reminding me that his members were not college educated, and that the skills they had honed did not appear to be immediately transferable to jobs paying anywhere near what they had made as typesetters.

That was the sticking point: how to utilize outmoded skills in a new configuration that would pay reasonable salaries.

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The intervening decades, and especially the current deep recession, have shown this to be a problem that affects far more than the typesetters. We are now advised that many of the jobs lost in the manufacturing, financial services and retailing sectors are not going to come back any time soon, if ever. So where will the new jobs come from, and how can we retrain former employees of those three sectors to be able to earn middle-class incomes in the future?

There is talk, in newspaper columns and in the blogosphere, about the permanent unemployability of people laid off from our automobile industry manufacturies. Seven hundred of them applied for a single janitorial job in an Ohio school district. The blogs treat these autoworkers as though their jobs had consisted of nothing more than tightening bolts in the way Charlie Chaplin did in “Modern Times.�

Anyone who has visited an automobile manufacturing plant in recent years can tell you, however, that this attitude about the autoworkers is nonsense, intellectual snobbery verging on bias. Today’s auto assembly line workers handle extremely complicated and demanding machines in a highly skillful way, interfacing with some of the most sophisticated machinery on earth. The work now stresses brain as much as brawn.

And that fact raises positive possibilities for the future. Today, an answer to the typesetters’ dilemma is emerging from two arenas. First, from where the jobs are projected to be — health care, education and environmental activities — and second, from a re-examination of the basis of the former employees’ presumed competence in their old jobs. The mental agility and acuity necessary to be a good typesetter or a good auto-line assembler are transferable, even if the particular skills they had acquired are not. People who can read backwards and deal with 2-ton robots have lots to offer.

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Of course, such people with “old� skills are not instantly ready for work in the fastest-growing fields. They require training, some of which can be extensive, but some of which can be obtained in a concentrated year of study and internship.

To accomplish this, two things must happen. First, unemployed, highly skilled people must be given the support needed — stipends and tuition — to obtain that training. This will require government spending, but not as much as the government would have to pay out to maintain those people and their families on welfare if they cannot find future work.

Second, it will require the industries to change some time-honored practices and let go of parts of their fiefdoms.

For instance, several studies have shown that physicians spend 90 percent of their time treating 10 percent of all illnesses, and only 10 percent of their time treating 90 percent of the illnesses. In fact, many common illness complaints can be treated by physician assistants (PAs), who have college degrees and are state-certified, though they have not been through six to eight years of medical training past college.

In some states — not all — PAs are permitted to treat patients in many ways. The various medical professional associations, fearful of losing income (or perhaps only status), have so far successfully prevented PAs and other health-care aides from expanding their numbers and — not incidentally — from lowering patients’ health-care costs. Similar paths to added employment of “para-professionals� exist in the educational and environmental fields.

Change is in the air. But we have had, as yet, little understanding of how deep and fundamental the changes must be in order to salvage our creaking economy.

Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.