Over the holidays, a death was reported of a person loved by some but hated by others -- loved by his members but hated by newspapers, printers, and typesetting services.

Time magazine put Bertram A. Powers on its March 1, 1963 cover with a illustration of a monkey wrench jamming a printing press. He was the longtime head of the New York printers’ union, which led one of the nation’s longest and most debilitating newspaper strikes and later negotiated a contract that guaranteed his members jobs for life as technology replaced their craft. He was 84.

At the height of his power in the early 1960s, Powers was a major national labor figure. He was elected president of Local 6, known as “Big Six” in 1961 and ended the practice of New York publishers reaching a new contract with one of the ten newspaper unions and imposing those terms on all of them. Powers was a tough bargainer with little faith in the altruism of employers and often said that “the only thing that counts is muscle.”