At 70, he is plagued with eye cataracts, and his office is the cluttered
corner of a Zionsville, Ind. farmhouse, which he claims was once used
as a chicken roost. But restless, lank Bloor Schleppey has a role in
American journalism as unusual as his name: he breaks strikes for pay. For the past quarter-century, ex-Newsman Schleppey's principal
antagonist has been the tightly organized International Typographical
Union. When publishers were hit with an I.T.U. strike, they called
Schleppey. Within hours Schleppey was on hand, and his men were
swarming into town by car, plane and train: a gang of nonunion
compositors and Linotype operators who moved into the struck composing
room, kept the paper going until new workers could be recruited locally
and trained to replace the strikers. Says Schleppey: “It's a terrific
job—you've got to have a rugged constitution. I've got one.” “Scab Herder.” Last week Schleppey's hired hands were getting out the
daily editions for the I.T.U.-struck Haverhill Gazette and the
Worcester Telegram. A Schleppey associate named Shirley Klein,
who calls herself a “legal consultant,” is directing another combat
team in the I.T.U. strike against the eleven-paper Macy chain in New
York's Westchester County. “Scab herder” is the I.T.U.'s word for Schleppey. Schleppey himself, who
prefers the term “publisher's counsel,” admits he has fought 30 strikes
over the years and lost “only a few.” But he likes to emphasize that he
also acts as a labor consultant at the bargaining table, claims his
interventions have headed off some 70 strikes. “I go into a strike to
save the whole operation,'' explains Schleppey. “I'm saving maybe 200
or 300 jobs that the union doesn't care about.” To raise his strikebreakers, Schleppey needs only dial a phone. “I call
up publishers who are clients and friends of clients who have nonunion
composing rooms,” says he. The publishers are happy to spare a man for
the cause, Schleppey claims. But anti-Schleppeymen charge that his
flying squads are mostly “drunks, misfits, social cripples and are
generally incompetent at their work.” Within days of their arrival in
Haverhill, several Schleppey recruits were arrested for drunkenness and
disorderly conduct. Behind Schleppey, charges the I.T.U., stands the American Newspaper
Publishers Association, which has often scheduled him as a convention
speaker. But while A.N.P.A. Labor Chief George Dale admits boosting
Schleppey , he declares flatly: “We've never paid Schleppey
a cent.” Red Ink. Just what he charges clients for breaking a strike, Schleppey
refuses to say—”As a general rule, I make less than in my law
practice.” Schleppey insists that his workers get paid at union scale,
but I.T.U. locals charge that they get up to three times as much.
Schleppey and his workers get all expenses paid. Working overtime,
often sleeping in cots in the plants, Schleppey's crews can make a
killing; one Linotype operator in Haverhill boasted to strikers that he
earned $2,000 in little more than a month.
