Today is Day 135 of the strike by journalists from Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 against the Dennis-family owned Chronicle Herald, which for years was the paper of record in Nova Scotia. I wrote elsewhere on Jan. 25 that the strike, which had been launched two days earlier, was a “battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle.” Sixty-one members of the newsroom staff initially walked off the job Jan. 23. Since then, that number is down to 57, as some have moved on to other jobs.
Remaining newsroom management, along with the numerous contract freelance journalists and recent journalist graduates, working without bylines for the most part, often from home, on everything from an occasional to full-time basis, have kept the paper going.
Replacement workers. Scabs. Same thing. The terminology depends on your perspective. Hiring temporary or permanent replacement workers during a work stoppage is legal in Nova Scotia. The union has called repeatedly on Liberal provincial Premier Stephen McNeil and Labour Minister and Bedford MLA Kelly Regan to introduce an “anti-scab law now.” The pleas have fallen on deaf ears.
Several days of talks, guided by a provincial mediator appointed from the Nova Scotia Industrial Relations Board, which began May 27 – the first substantive discussions between the company and the union since the strike began 20 weeks ago – broke down June 1. During the five days of mediation the union agreed to a news blackout and suspended secondary picketing, at places such as Steele Subaru, which have refused to stop advertising in the paper, leafleting, boycotts and social media criticism of the company at the insistence of the mediator, but have resumed the tactics now talks have fallen apart and they are now longer bound by that commitment to the mediator.
How far apart are the two sides? “Talks between the Chronicle Herald and its striking newsroom workers broke off today when the company tabled a position worse than the one that forced workers to strike in January,” the union said in a news release June 1. “The company wants to lay off almost half the 57 newsroom workers,” the union said last Wednesday, “and drop the hourly pay rate by 20 per cent. It would move the work of 18 senior editors outside the union with an annual salary drop of $20,000 to $40,000 with no guarantee of continued employment. Most editors have more than 25 years of service with the Herald.”
“David Wilson, lead negotiator for the union, said the stance taken by The Chronicle Herald is ‘unworkable and insulting.’ He said the Herald’s position is “unlike that of any other newspaper company in the country.
“The employer says it needs to get the concessions that our union has given at other newspapers across the country and I say, ‘What concessions?’ “Outside of a few tweaks to allow for more flexibility, there have been no concessions at other newspapers,” he said.
“We presented a concessionary offer to the employer last week that should have piqued the employer’s interest. It had concessions we never anticipated we’d give, and yet it was still rejected.” Frank Campbell, Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 vice-president, reportedly told rabble.ca: “We changed direction on the pension plan – we had a defined benefit pension plan with the company and we made some suggestions about moving into a different plan, which they basically wanted from the start.” Defined benefit pension plans are considered the gold standard and pension plans under which a member’s pension is determined with reference to the member’s remuneration for each year of employment, or for a selected number of years of employment, or is expressed as a fixed amount for each year of employment, or as a fixed periodic amount. A defined benefit pension is just as it sounds. The payout, when it comes time to collect, is fixed to a certain formula. The formula is typically a combination of years of service multiplied by a percentage of your average salary over the last several years of service.
More popular with private sector employers in recent years are defined-contribution plans, which are retirement plans in which a certain amount or percentage of money is set aside each year by a company for the benefit of the employee. The biggest downside to defined contribution plans is there is no way to know how much the plan will ultimately give the employee upon retiring. The amount contributed is fixed, but the benefit is not. In a June 2 statement, CWA Canada, headquartered in Ottawa, urged the striking Halifax newsroom workers to stand firm in the face of an “insulting” contract offer that “torpedoed mediation talks on Wednesday.”
President Martin O’Hanlon said he shares their “anger and bitter disappointment.” The Halifax Typographical Union’s bargaining team, he said, did everything it could to break the stalemate and get a deal. It “went well beyond its comfort level” in presenting a “major concessionary offer that addressed the company’s key demands. Members of Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 unanimously endorsed their bargaining committee at June 2 meeting.
“Any fair-minded employer would have jumped on the offer,” said O’Hanlon. Instead, the Herald’s response was a “worse offer than previously, lowlighted by even more layoffs” which proves “beyond doubt” that CEO Mark Lever is not “interested in an agreement unless the union is emasculated.
“This may be a long, hard battle,” said O’Hanlon, “but it is a battle we cannot afford to lose. We are fighting the good fight for quality jobs and quality journalism and you have the full support of the national union, the international, and all your newsroom colleagues … across the country.”
On the company side last week, Ian Scott, chief operating officer for the Halifax Herald Ltd., told CBC News he didn’t expect union members to walk away from the bargaining table last Wednesday.
“We were actually quite surprised,” Scott said, adding the company offered union members “the richest deal in Atlantic Canada in the newspaper industry, without question.”
On the Saturday morning of Jan. 23, when the strike began, management of the privately-owned Herald issued layoff notices – later suspended – to 18 members of the bargaining unit, including 12 editors, four photographers and two page technicians. One of those photographers was Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 president Ingrid Bulmer. Some of the striking editors were offered new non-union jobs in the company’s centralized production centre, while other workers were offered a year’s severance pay. However, all 18 layoff notices were quickly suspended.
“The result of a work stoppage, in this case a strike, suspends various aspects of the employment relationship, including the layoff notices,” Nancy Cook, confirmed in an email at the time to CBC News.
On June 3, after mediated talks broke down earlier in the week, the company issued a second list of names to be on future layoff notices to eight additional newsroom reporters and columnists, including veteran restaurant columnist and features writer Bill Spurr, making for a total of 26 intended layoff notices over the two rounds Jan. 23 and June 3.
While the first round of notices included some employment reoffers, the latest eight layoffs the company signalled Friday are intended to be permanent and do not include any work reoffers. Add in the four newsies – Mike Gorman (political reporter), Dan Arsenault (crime reporter), Gordie Sutherland (web editor) and David Jackson (web editor) who have left voluntarily since the strike began, and you come to a grand total of 30 of 57 remaining unionized positions you have the company wanting to eliminate – or expressed another way, at 52.63 per cent – more than half the remaining unionized news staff. The company wants to eliminated the web desk and outsource that work to Toronto.
On Jan. 30, a week after the strike began, the striking Halifax journos launched their own online strike paper, called the Local Xpress (https://www.localxpress.ca/), registered in Nova Scotia as a non-profit – and upped the ante even more May 19 when they re-launched it as a full-service online news site to compete with the Chronicle Herald by partnering with Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.-based Village Media, using their digital content management platform. It seems in this war, both sides have turned to the come-from- aways of dreaded Upper Canada for help with their digital content management platforms. “This is an important partnership and launch for Village Media,” said Jeff Elgie, chief executive officer of Village Media in a May 19 statement. “Local XPress’ launch is a testament [to] the power of our digital platform and the flexibility we have in launching new communities quickly and effectively.”
Village Media was “born digital” with its first online news site, Elgie said, with SooToday.com, over 15 years ago.
Local XPress is completely independent from Village Media, Elgie said, although the partnership provides them use of the platform.
In addition to local news, the revamped Local Xpress website now offers weather, events, obituaries, and a wide range of community information, as well as national news feeds. After the venerable Guelph Mercury, known to generations simply as the “Merc” closed Jan. 29, laying off all 26 staff, Elgie moved up a planned expansion into Guelph by Village Media by about seven months to launch GuelphToday.com Feb. 8 – just nine days after the Merc’s demise – hiring reporters Rob O’Flanagan and Tony Saxon from the Guelph Mercury for GuelphToday.com, as its only full-time reporters, while former Merc columnists Scott Tracey and Owen Roberts agreed to write regular opinion pieces, while Village Media builds a roster of freelancers in Guelph.
“Our growth is directly linked to our focus on local stories written by local journalists and this is a belief we share with Local Xpress,” Elgie added.
Local Xpress is also accepting donations through a Patreon campaign (https://www.patreon.com/localxpress?ty=h). Patreon, a Palo Alto, California company, is a type of crowdfunding website that allows content creators to make money off the work they create. So far, they have attracted 188 patrons and $1,412 – with their goal being $1,000 per month.
The striking journalists working for the Local Xpress do not draw a salary from the website, but they do receive about $600 a week in strike pay through their parent union, the Communications Workers of America Syndicat des communications d’Amérique (CWA|SCA Canada), and can work at the Local Xpress in lieu of some of their picket line duties. Advertising revenue or donations will go toward expenses incurred by news gathering such as parking, mileage and website hosting costs.
“So far, we’ve paid all our own expenses,” Local Xpress said May 19. “The photographer or reporter you see at an event paid for the gas to get there, parking costs, etc. – right down to their camera and tape recorder batteries. And we receive no salaries other than our regular strike pay, which we’d get even if we didn’t work on the Xpress. “Our union local and our parent union, CWA Canada, have also shouldered all the costs so far of starting up and maintaining our site. And while our news is free, Internet start-up costs aren’t – helping to fund us will mean that over time we can make our site better (the under-the-hood stuff) and add more content.”
If the strike is resolved, Local Xpress will be shut down.
That’s looking like a big if right now with no new talks between the sides planned. “Keep your eye on the strike that started Saturday in Nova Scotia when Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 struck the Chronicle Herald at 12:01 a.m. AST, the minute they were in a legal position to do so,” I wrote Jan. 25. “While most of the recent attention has been on Postmedia, management proposed more than 1,232 changes to the now expired old contract. All the big issues are in play here. The CH wants to eliminate its digital deskers and outsource the work to Toronto. Other work is being outsourced to Brunswick News in New Brunswick (i.e. Irving). Scab journalists are now producing the local CH news. The Communications Workers of America (CWA), the Newspaper Guild sector’s union parent in Washington, D.C. have very deep pockets, but whether this is the fight they want to stand or fall on in terms of newspapers, which is only a small part of their representation, is hard to say. Sometimes those type of choices are forced on you. As for the CH, it is controlled by the Dennis family, and has been for years, making it the last independent daily of any note in Canada. This is not Postmedia or Glacier or Transcontinental chain ownership. What it is though is a battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle in an industry where I wish I could say I’ve seen some successful newspaper strikes. Truth is, I haven’t, I’m sorry to say.”
I was working at the Peterborough Examiner when Chicago Typographical Union No. 16, Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 and Chicago Mailers Union Local 2 struck the Chicago Tribune on the evening of July 18, 1985 when their contracts with the Chicago Newspaper Publishers’ Association, a collective bargaining association to which the Tribune belonged, expired. The unions were fighting the introduction of new technology and changes in work rules the company sought, including demands for more control of hiring and assignments. In response to the strike, the Tribune began hiring permanent replacement workers. “Violence ensued shortly thereafter,” wrote the Chicago-based United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in a March 1996 decision related to enforcement of a National Labour Relations Board order. “Incidents ranged from the relatively benign, such as unsolicited orders for food deliveries or magazine subscriptions, to more dangerous activities such as the slashing of tires, death threats, and the stabbing of a Tribune delivery driver. On one occasion, mounted police were called to disperse a mob that had obstructed the path of the Tribune’s delivery trucks. Stones thrown by the mob injured one of the truck drivers, a policeman, and other Tribune employees.”
The striking Chicago Web Printing Pressmen’s Union Local 7 unconditionally offered to return to work on Jan. 30, 1986.
The printers’ strike, however, continued and lasted 40 months.
Little more than a decade later was the Detroit newspaper strike of July 1995 to December 2000. Teamsters Locals 372 and 2040 and allied AFL-CIO unions, including the Newspaper Guild of Detroit Local 34022, making up the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU), struck the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA), as it was known in 1995, which ran the non-editorial business and production operations of the Detroit Free Press, owned at the time by now defunct Knight-Ridder, and the Detroit News, owned by Gannett, under a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA), on July 13, 1995, with about 2,500 members of six different unions going on strike. Joint Operating Agreements came about as a result of the federal Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, which allowed for the formation of JOA’s, as they are commonly known, among competing newspaper operations within the same market area. It enshrined in law special exemptions, dating back to 1933 and the E.W. Scripps Co.-owned Albuquerque Tribune in New Mexico, to antitrust laws that ordinarily prohibit such co-operation between competitors, based on the theory it would allow for the survival of multiple daily newspapers in a given urban market where circulation was declining. In practice, however, noble their origins may have been, JOA’s haven’t had that intended result in many cases, especially by the time the 1990s rolled around.
By the seven-week mark of the strike in early September 1995, about 40 per cent of the unionized editorial staff had crossed the picket line to return to work, including Mitch Albom, the Detroit Free Press sports columnist, who was the newspaper’s best known and most popular writer, and who two years later in 1997 would go onto publish the landmark bestseller, Tuesdays with Morrie, about his dozen or so Tuesday visits in the fall of 1995 in suburban Boston with Morrie Schwartz, a former professor of his at Brandeis University, who Albom had lost touch with until he saw him interviewed about his Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, by Ted Koppel on ABC News Nightline. Schwartz died on Nov. 4, 1995. Albom began his Sept. 6, 1995 column about the newspaper strike with one word: “Enough.” But he also wrote that he would remain a member of the Newspaper Guild and “give much of what I earn to the people still on strike.” Albom said in an interview, “Newspapers are fire stations, they are police stations, and they should not be shut down.” Albom, “who tried to broker an agreement that would return strikers to work during negotiations,” reported James Bennet of the New York Times on Sept. 6, 1995 in a story headlined, “After 7 Weeks, Detroit Newspaper Strike Takes a Violent Turn,” said that he “thought both sides in the dispute were wrong and that he did not want to be seen as supporting either. ‘I didn’t want to be waved as a flag,’” Albom said.
Ten years later in 2005, Albom and four editors who had read the column and allowed it to go to print were briefly suspended from the Detroit Free Press after Albom filed an April 3, 2005 column that stated Mateen Cleaves and Jason Richardson, two former Michigan State basketball players, who had gone onto the NBA, were in attendance at an NCAA Final Four semi-final game on, when they were not. The players had told Albom they planned to attend, and filing Friday before the game, Albom wrote as if the players were there, including that they wore Michigan State green. But Cleaves and Richard’s plans changed at the last minute and they never attended. Albom was in attendance at the game, but failed to check on the two players’ presence.
Nineteen months after it began, the union leadership said it would call off the strike on Feb. 14, 1997, if the two papers would rehire striking union members. The companies rejected the offer for the most part, saying they would only rehire a fraction of the striking workers, as new vacancies allowed, because they wouldn’t let go of they any of their replacement workers hired during the 19-month strike, resulting in the strike being transformed into a lockout, which continued for years. On July 7, 2000, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. overturned earlier decisions by the National Labor Relations Board that the unions and their members were the victims of a series of unfair labor practice actions committed by the newspapers during the labor dispute. The last of the six unions settled in December, 2000, and, more than five years after it began, the Detroit newspaper strike was over.
And the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild Local 37082 49-day strike against The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2000-2001 took place at a time I sat on the Newspaper Guild’s Washington-based international sector council as vice-president for Eastern Canada. At the time of the strike, the two papers had been operating under a JOA since May 23, 1983, with the Seattle Times owned by the Blethen family’s Seattle Times Co., and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer owned by Hearst Corp. When the dispute ended, the Seattle Times newsroom employees wound up settling in terms of wages for what the company was offering when the strike began, but the two-tier pay system was eliminated as a result of the strike, and the amount the company paid toward health insurance premiums went up from 66 percent to 75 percent, so one might argue the union won at least a marginal victory. The Hearst Corp.’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, or P-I, as it is known in Seattle, ceased print operations on March 17, 2009, becoming an online only publication with a vastly reduced news staff of about 20 people rather than the 165 it had, and a site with mostly commentary, advice and links to other news sites, along with some original reporting. The JOA ended with the cessation of the P-I print edition.
Parker Donham’s March 9 post on his Contrarian blog (http://contrarian.ca/2016/03/09/why-the-herald-workers-are-losing-and-how-they-could-win/), headlined “Why the Herald workers are losing – and how they could win,” where he writes the “notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional,” was probably a hard analysis for the striking HTU workers to read, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere before, but still not without merit, in my view. A look outside the box is often a good thing even if you don’t see the box.
Wrote Donham in part in his post: “The striking journalists have also picketed various Herald advertisers – as if driving revenue away from a business whose problems stem from an industry-wide hemorrhage of revenue somehow served their interests.
“The frustration and fear workers feel as they watch their livelihood – their calling – slip away is understandable. But the notion that 1940s-style industrial union tactics can win the day for journalists in 2016 is delusional.
“Whatever faint hope the strikers have rests in part on public opinion. It does not help their cause to construct artificial tests in the form of secondary picket lines, then condemn as enemies anyone who fails these tests. It would make much more sense to court Herald readers, including the mayor and the members of the Greater Halifax Partnership, by demonstrating what journalistic craft and talent means to a modern city.
“Chances of a six-day-a-week print edition of the Chronicle-Herald existing in 2020 are next to nil. Everyone involved – workers, owners, readers, community leaders – must adjust to this new reality.
“That’s the one shining light in this dispiriting conflict. When they aren’t wasting their time on picket lines and posting gratuitous insults, the striking journalists have been producing a creditable daily news website.
“News stories in Local Xpress (http://www.localxpress.ca/) have consistently set a higher journalistic standard than the strike-breaker copy that fills the Herald’s pages. No surprise there. The best Herald writers and editors are very good at what they do.”
Perhaps with a touch of prescience, writing more than two months before it happened, Donham suggested the “Local Xpress could be so much more. A professionally produced news website aimed at the interests and temperament of traditional Herald readers poses a bigger threat to the Herald’s owners than pickets at the local Ford dealership, or Facebook insults directed at the mayor.
“As a condition of receiving strike pay, Herald workers walk the picket line 20 hours a week. The requirement is reduced, but not eliminated, for workers who contribute to Local Xpress. The strikers’ smarter course would be to abandon picket lines altogether and throw their hearts, souls, and talents into the task of beating the Herald at its own game.
‘The strikers can report news better, faster, and more accurately than the desperate substitutes struggling to fill their dead-tree shoes.
‘Instead of picketing advertisers, the strikers should be luring them to their news site – with irresistible copy and advertising opportunities. Sell ads. Sell subscriptions. Offer supportive readers a chance to contribute to the survival of good journalism in Halifax. Lobby civic leaders in grownup conversations, not by shouting at them from picket lines.
‘I don’t know what will become of the Herald,” Donham wrote in March, “or its striking workers. But a top-notch local news website run by capable journalists seems a far better bet than hoping for a return to good old days that are gone forever.”
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