Seattle Strikes Out   

The Newspaper Guild is the big loser in the aftermath of the Times/Post-Intelligencer walkout.

AS IF IT NEEDED proving again, the Newspaper Guild showed in Seattle that it is a strategic mistake to strike a newspaper in this era of electronic production, absent some grievous malfeasance by management. It's akin to deciding, after the wheel has been invented, to invent it again--to make it what? Rounder?
After 49 days, strikers at the Seattle Times agreed to terms that were not significantly different from those they walked out on to protest. Newsroom employees at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which relies on the Times for business operations under a joint operating agreement, agreed to similar terms 11 days earlier.
As in most strikes, a share of blame for what happened probably can be laid on both unions (a composing room union also struck) and management. But in terms of economic consequences for striking employees, the decision to strike was a disaster. Strikers lost pay during the walkout, only partly supplanted by union benefits. Many others may lose pay for up to six months because of a negotiated phase in of returning workers.
Most important, the Times intends to recoup some of the millions it lost during the strike with a permanent 10 percent reduction in its work force. This is a development for which the unions have only themselves to blame. Job cuts became an issue only after the disruption dragged on.
One would think that newspaper unions, and especially the Guild, would have learned some lessons from the disastrous strike against the Detroit newspapers. There, by walking out, the unions handed management on a silver platter what it would have taken a decade to negotiate--the elimination of hundreds of union jobs unneeded since the earlier merger of the two Detroit papers into a joint operating agency.
The point is, the technological revolution that swept through the daily newspaper industry in the 1970s made it impossible in most instances for unions to shut down newspapers with a strike. That is why newspaper strikes nowadays are so rare and invariably result in economic losses for strikers, compared with the 30 to 40 strikes a year common 40 or 50 years ago.
In Seattle, the Guild's international president, Linda K. Foley, was quoted as saying at a press conference, "We made them bargain, and they recognize now they are going to have to bargain in the future."
Well, yes, but the Guild also transformed a management that had always been a rather easygoing bargainer (the Times hadn't had a strike in 47 years) into a harder-nosed opponent determined to cut jobs. That's progress?
The Blethen family, which owns a controlling interest in the Times, has had a reputation as a generous employer not driven, as so many newspaper companies are these days, by an overwhelming emphasis on the bottom line. According to management, 90 percent of Guild employees at the Times last year earned 28 percent on average above the Guild minimums because of merit and incentive payments. That and a history of spending more than is typical in other ways on the editorial product are among the reasons the Times Co. has profit margins considerably lower than industry averages.
The low margins have been a sore point for Knight Ridder, which owns the 49.5 percent of the Times not owned by the Blethens (see "Independent's Day"). Indeed, a month before the strike began, Knight Ridder offered to buy out the Blethens, an overture promptly rejected by the family, which is determined to keep the Times under its ownership.
Unlike Knight Ridder and Gannett, owners of the two struck newspapers in Detroit, the Seattle Times Co. is not a huge enterprise by newspaper-company standards, with enormous reserves to offset strike losses. Moreover, the company carries substantial debt from its 1998 acquisition of the Portland Press Herald and two related dailies in Maine for about $200 million.
The Times offered wage increases in line with what Guild units at other papers have recently accepted--an average of about 2.5 percent per year over six years--and in line with what other unions at the paper had accepted. The Guild initially demanded increases nearly four times that, then scaled it down. In the end, the Guild accepted the company's wage offer and gained a mild increase in medical benefits and the phaseout of a lower pay scale for suburban reporters.
Early in the dispute, a striking reporter told me of sentiment within the Guild that employees might be better off if Knight Ridder took over. I told him that if the strikers thought the Blethens were difficult to negotiate with, they would be in for a shock if Knight Ridder were in charge. Another of the Guild's dubious achievements in Seattle is that this may no longer be true.