I wrote elsewhere on Jan. 25 that the Chronicle-Herald newspaper strike in Nova Scotia, which had been launched by Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 two days earlier, was a “battle that already has all the makings of an epic struggle.”
That was a month after Christmas. Sixty-five days and 10 weeks later, winter has turned to spring. Tomorrow is Easter.
My time at the CH was brief and 16 years was a long time ago.
But I do remember from that time, which coincided both with me serving as vice-president for Eastern Canada for The Newspaper Guild Canada/Communications Workers of America (CWA), as well as working briefly in the Truro bureau of the CH, the courage of several of their folks, at least one of whom is on the picket line now 16 years later, in them fighting, along with the local, national and international union in the spring of 1999 (when I was still working at the Peterborough Examiner in Ontario, before moving to Nova Scotia and the CH that fall) in a hotly contested hearing at the province’s Labour Board, to be rightly included in the newly-formed editorial bargaining unit, as the Chronicle-Herald spent a fortune trying to exclude them in an expensive battle in which the union ultimately prevailed.
What struck me most was their true sense of solidarity with their brothers and sisters at the paper. These were journalists high enough up the CH newsroom hierarchy to be evidently worth the time and expense on management’s part to fight so desperately to exclude them from the newly-formed bargaining unit; they weren’t trying to join the union to win a first contract that might add $20 more to their weekly pay. They were already well compensated relative to their colleagues at the paper and their career trajectories in the spring of 1999 presumably had nowhere to go but up, based on their employment histories and achievements with the paper. There was relatively little personal gain in sight for them in joining the fledgling union bargaining unit. If anything, the opposite was more likely to be true; they risked being blacklisted by CH management and having their career paths frozen. Yet they did fight. On principle. And they won.
“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. 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,” is probably a hard analysis for the striking HTU workers to read, 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 earlier this month: “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.”
So all of that about newspaper strikes remains true. Recent newspaper strike history is clearly not on the side of the Chronicle Herald newsroom strikers from Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 But does that estop them from winning this fight? Not necessarily. Winning against long odds is not impossible or we wouldn’t have David victorious over Goliath, the champion of the Philistines; United Automobile Workers (UAW) besting General Motors in the Flint, Michigan Sit-Down Strike of 1936-37; Mahatma Gandhi outlasting the British Empire; or Nelson Mandela triumphing over the former apartheid state of South Africa stories to tell. The Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 is receiving support not just from their parent union and newspaper union locals far and wide, but also from the Nova Scotia Federation of Labour and the wider public and private sector labour movement in Nova Scotia.
And then there is the matter of resolve, hard to quantify perhaps, but which was in evidence in the kind of resolve that saw one or more of these pioneering picketers exhibit at the provincial labour board in the battle with CH management for inclusion in the new editorial bargaining unit of Halifax Typographical Union Local 30130 in the spring of 1999.
Mark Lever, president and chief executive officer of the Chronicle Herald, and a former tennis coach, might think twice or three times before betting on his high-priced legal advice over that.
Resolve: Advantage, HTU Local 30130.
A former vice-president for Eastern Canada for The Newspaper Guild Canada/Communications Workers of America (CWA), and president of Peterborough Typographical Union Local 30248, chartered in 1902, John Barker currently belongs to Manitoba Government and General Employees’ Union (MGEU) Component 11, Post Secondary Education, Local 70, University College of the North (UCN), Area 8, where he is a rank-and-file member, working as a library clerk on the Thompson campus of UCN, speaking only for himself in the views he expresses here, there or anywhere. You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22
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