It was almost midnight in Grand Central Station on a spring night in 1992. An elderly man wearing a blue New York Times windbreaker was leaning on a cane on the platform, waiting for a train to Westchester County. I had been at the Times for several years and I was puzzled by the ghostly figure. “Do you work for the paper?” I asked. Many years earlier, he said, he had been a typesetter at the Times. In 1973 his union negotiated a deal to phase out workers’ jobs while the company implemented computerized printing systems in exchange for guaranteed employment until retirement. Although he had not worked for more than a decade, he still enjoyed coming to the press in Times Square and spending his evenings with the remaining pressmen as they produced the next day’s paper. Today, the printer’s fate remains a poignant story about labor in the face of a new wave of AI-based automation technologies. His union first battled with newspaper publishers in the 1960s and struck a historic accommodation in the 1970s.
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