It’s 1,530 Days and Counting for 4 Strikers : After 4 Years on Picket Line, Printers Hold Little Hope for Settlement of Neyenesch Dispute

The roar of jet engines from planes landing and taking off at nearby Lindbergh Field was deafening, but Ray Wetherbee and Al Tomaino hardly acknowledged the noise that forced a visitor to shout at the two elderly men.

“Airplane? What airplane?” asked an amused Wetherbee, as he and Tomaino stood between two picket signs that were propped in a fence in front of Neyenesch Printers Inc.

After spending more than four years on the picket line, noise pollution is at worst a minor inconvenience, Tomaino said. But the reality that they will probably never get their jobs back, despite 50 months on the picket line, hurts deeply, both men said.

Wetherbee, 66, Tomaino, 69, and six other printers who learned their craft on a Linotype--back in an era when newspapers and most printing were produced on hot type--struck Neyenesch on June 13, 1983, over a pay dispute. Wetherbee, Tomaino, Ed Cordova, 58, and Warren Schuler are the only ones who have persisted with the strike and have picketed the company every working day since the walkout four summers ago.

Schuler marks on his picket sign the number of days the four have been on strike. On Thursday, the count was up to 1,530 days.

Efforts May Prove to Be Futile

All of the strikers, including the ones who are no longer picketing, are “good union men,” said Wetherbee, and no one crossed the picket line. “You didn’t find any scabs in the printers union,” he added, using the past tense. But however noble their intentions and dedication to union principles, the strikers are also the first to admit that their efforts over the years have probably been futile.

“There’s always hope, but after four years it kind of dwindles,” Tomaino said.

Over the years the International Typographical Union has supported the four strikers by paying each of them $200 a week in strike pay. However, the typographers’ union recently merged with the Communication Workers of America and the strikers are not sure how much longer the union will support the strike.

“As long as the union backs us up, we’ll be out here,” said Wetherbee, who began working in printing shops when he was 12. “ . . . But I’ll tell you what has hurt us more than anything--the Teamsters. It would’ve helped if all of the Teamster drivers had

honored our picket line, but not all of them did. To this day the only drivers who have honored our line are the UPS drivers.”

Teamsters officials could not be reached for comment.

The strikers still call themselves Neyenesch employees. Wetherbee worked at the company 30 years, during the time that it was a family-owned business, and he knew all of the Neyenesch owners personally. But Josiah Neeper, Neyenesch attorney and spokesman, said the men stopped being company employees years ago.

“To the best of my knowledge, no Neyenesch employees are on strike,” said Neeper when asked about the strikers. “ . . . (They) remained on strike so long that they ceased to be employees under the National Labor Relations Act.”

Wetherbee said the men did not want to strike, but the company refused to compromise on a new contract.

“They wanted to take away a lot of benefits and to reduce our pay by 33%,” Wetherbee said. “All we wanted was to renew our contract with no raise. We couldn’t see losing those benefits. We weren’t making that much money to begin with, only about $12 an hour.”

Neeper, with the law firm Gray Cary Ames and Frye, said that he has represented Neyenesch “for years before the strike began.” His version of the contract dispute differs from Wetherbee’s.

“The major issue was related to changes in technology and appropriate compensation . . . The company was using people with less responsibility and less skills. Technology, the computer, had reduced the skills level of a (hot-type printing) job,” Neeper said. “But it wasn’t new technology that displaced them. . . . Certainly, technology changed the nature of the work. In the shift to cold type process, the skills level needed to do the work (was) significantly greater.”

Union, Technology Blamed

But Wetherbee, Tomaino and Cordova say they were as much victims of technology as their union’s failure to reach an agreement with Neyenesch.

“Automation really hit us pretty hard . . . . When we went on strike the plant tried cold type (computerized photo typesetting), but they had a hard time making it work,” Cordova said. “But before the strike I did get to work a little bit on the computer. It was different. The computer changed the composing room.”

(The composing room is the place where individual pages are physically put together by printers and where stories or pictures are trimmed to fit each page. Typesetting is a more common function in a composing room.)

Although the strike has been hard on the men, they admit that they would have given up long ago were it not for their wives’ jobs. The anger present during the first “days, weeks, months and years” of the strike has dissipated, Tomaino said.

“We had to have some bitterness, but after a time that bitterness mellows,” he said.

Nobody thought that the strike would drag this long.

‘We’ve Proceeded’

“Heavens, no. We had no idea at all,” Cordova said. “After our first year, we were dumbfounded by the whole thing. We figured the union was going to put a stop to it. After a year, we figured at that time we lost it. But we’ve proceeded, and it’s amazing.”

While the strikers were talking to a visitor, a younger man drove out of the company parking lot and waved. Wetherbee and Tomaino waved back and smiled.

“He used to be in our union, but he switched to management before the strike,” Wetherbee said.

Later, Cordova joked about the strike and wondered how a trade that he has loved and practiced since high school has brought him so much grief.

“I’ve loved printing all my life. I love the smell of ink and everything about the job. You know, I worked at Pioneer Press, another shop in town, for 16 years. But they finally went non-union and then they closed down. When Pioneer went non-union I went to Neyenesch,” Cordova said. “Then Neyenesch went non-union.”

The Neyenesch strike is approaching the length of another long printers’ strike in San Diego. A handful of determined strikers picketed Central Graphics for five years before giving up, Cordova said.

Wetherbee shakes his head and says: “At one time, our union was the strongest in the country. At one time . . . ,” his voice trailed off as he and Tomaino turned around to watch an airliner take off.

“Well, he’s almost taking off on time. We’ve been here so long that we know the flight schedules better than the controllers,” Tomaino said. “We know every type of aircraft that flies out of here.”