Whither the Guild?   

The Seattle setback is the latest reflection of the declining clout of the Newspaper Guild. Can new initiatives strengthen its hand?

MARC D. ALLAN IS in labor-negotiation limbo.
As union local president at the Indianapolis Star, he's had little success working on a contract with the paper's new owner, Gannett. The company has offered a less appealing package than the deal that expired in October, says Allan, and refuses to budge. (Gannett declined to comment.) "We're nowhere," he says.
But he knows there is little he can do. The Star has an open shop, and about half of its 270 eligible employees are in the union, even though all are covered by the contract. That lack of unity makes it harder to pressure the company, he says, especially with a no-strike clause. Besides, he doesn't believe strikes ever lead to anything productive. The union's only leverage, Allan says, is the existing contract and "a nice smile."
Nowhere was that loss of leverage more evident than in the outcomes of the two recent high-profile strikes in Seattle and Detroit. After 49 days off the job, employees at the Seattle Times early this year won a few relatively minor contract concessions, but lost a quarter of their ranks in the newsroom and suffered incalculable damage in talent and goodwill at one of the last family-owned metro newspapers (see "Middle Man," March). Detroit's strike is widely considered a tragedy for both the Guild and the newspapers‹multiply the costs in Seattle by five-and-a-half years. The Detroit papers' circulation dropped by the hundreds of thousands, and the Guild no longer has a security agreement to ensure employees join.
The outcomes aren't surprising. Membership in the once-powerful craft unions of decades past has been shrunk by changes in technology and delivery. Those advances have also made it next to impossible for unionized employees to stop a paper from publishing during a strike. Plus, companies are quick to hire replacement workers and can call on their parent companies for financial help during a walkout. Faced with these obstacles, does the Guild still have a role to play?

FRESH FROM A STRIKE that cost his company millions, Seattle Times Publisher Frank Blethen says employees no longer need a Guild that is out of touch with its members and ends up hurting their interests. "The world is such a different place for employee or employer than it was 25 years ago. Any employer worth their salt has to provide good wages, good working conditions, a good working environment," he says.
Whether they provided good working conditions or not, management was far less likely to succeed at attempts to limit benefits and job protection 30 or 40 years ago, at least without a strike. But newspaper unions' power has waned considerably over recent decades for a number of reasons:
Technological changes since the 1960s have dramatically reduced the ranks of the craft unions such as the pressmen and mailers, which historically provided the muscle in disputes with newspapers. In addition, federal mediator Brian L. Flores notes that it takes far fewer people to put out a paper than it used to, and there are far fewer papers now, with most owned by a small number of big corporations with the resources to withstand a strike. "Anytime you have technology displacing people and plus the buying up of newspapers and shutting down of newspapers, it's a constantly collapsing universe" that has left employees with less leverage, he says.
The percentage overall of membership in newspaper unions has fallen from between 17 and 20 percent of newspaper employees in 1975 to about 10 percent in the last year or so, says Howard Stanger, business professor and newspaper labor relations researcher at Buffalo State College, State University of New York.
Drumming up enthusiasm for the union at all is tougher than it used to be in newsrooms, Flores says. Reporters believe they are professionals, not hourly workers. "It's an age of specialists," he says, "particularly at big-city dailies. There's a different mind-set among the reportorial staff," a belief that they don't need a union.
Class divisions between editorial employees and other newspaper workers further weaken the Guild, both internally and in its ability to work with unions in other departments. "At one time, [when] craft unions were very strong, many journalists tried to separate themselves from blue-collar craft people, which has probably haunted rather than helped" unionized newspaper workers, says Stanger. They would have more clout with management if they joined forces, he says.
Many Guild units include advertising and circulation workers. "Historically, I think that putting us together with everybody else didn't work," says William Serrin, a former New York Times labor reporter who is now an author and a journalism instructor at New York University. As a former union member at the Detroit Free Press and New York Times, Serrin says he had "no affinity with the people who take classified ads."
Former Seattle Times investigative reporter Eric Nalder, who recently joined the San Jose Mercury News, says there's always a class system at newspapers, "where advertising and circulation people often make less money." In a strike, he says, those lines can become aggravated. "A lot of journalists, they're independent-minded, for one thing, and too often from privilege. They don't...understand unions, nor are they willing to take part in a struggle like that."
Flores credits a single event nearly 20 years ago with altering acceptable tactics in a labor dispute: the infamous PATCO strike, when President Ronald Reagan fired more than 11,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Association who had illegally walked off the job, banning them from government employment and hiring replacement workers.
Flores, who was the strike mediator, says Reagan's action "set the tone for the private sector," which had won the legal right to use replacements in the late 1930s, but rarely, if ever, hired any. Since the PATCO strike, he says, companies have been much quicker to threaten to hire replacements. "If the employer suggests at the table they'll be permanently replaced, union leadership has had a very tough time getting any kind of militancy," he says.
But unions also have themselves to blame for some of their waning power. The Guild has failed to convince younger journalists and noneditorial employees "that the Guild will do better for them," Stanger says. Even some career-long Guild members complain that the leadership doesn't represent their interests. Serrin says the Guild locals he belonged to were "never interested in city-room issues.... How long stories should be, could you be more democratic in assigning stories. They were never involved in helping us to work with editors."
In open shops, where even non-dues-paying-employees benefit from the union contract, that need is especially acute. A company can challenge the union's right to negotiate a contract if it thinks the union doesn't represent a majority of workers, says Newspaper Guild President Linda K. Foley, although it is a difficult process.
Bill McGraw, an active union member and longtime reporter with the Detroit Free Press, recalls a recent conversation with a 24-year-old reporter at the Detroit News. "I asked her if she was going to join the union, and she said, ŒI don't really know anything about it.' There's clearly a need for the unions to really reach out to let people know" what they can offer, he says.
That's the fault of journalism schools as much as the Guild, Serrin says. "We get students now who have no conception of what a union is or ought to be, or the need for unions in a newsroom," he says, and "we're part of the problem." J-schools don't address these issues in the classroom, he says, but then again, in nine years at NYU he has never seen a speaker from the Guild on campus.
Foley admits that the Guild needs to improve its campus presence. "We used to have quite active campus chapters," she says, but they've dissolved over the years. She says the Guild has some good ideas but hasn't implemented all of them.

TO REGAIN ANY of the leverage it's lost, the Guild first needs to boost its membership, says Stanger. "Last time there was any real organizing was in the early to mid-'80s," he says. "They just haven't done any new organizing." Stanger says workers "have to have a single media union" to have any clout in today's corporate newspaper world, a highly unlikely development given how complicated it would be to accomplish. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News, for instance, have 11 separate unions.
Two years after Foley took over the presidency of the Newspaper Guild in 1995, she added to its resources by merging with the Communications Workers of America, bumping up the 32,000-member Guild to a 740,000-member organization. With the shift to the Web and other electronic delivery systems, the Guild is changing its organizing and bargaining strategies, she says.
"We're doing a lot more emphasis on organizing outside of the areas where we have" in the past, Foley says. "We've made a real push to use our existing bargaining relationships to reach out to newspapers that work on the Web.... I see our future as one where we have to not just look at ourselves as a union of reporters, not just in the print media."
To that end, the national Newspaper Guild filed unfair labor practices against KnightRidder.com after Knight Ridder moved its papers' Web operations to a separate corporate subsidiary. Online employees who previously worked for the Philadelphia Inquirer, for example, are now employed by KnightRidder.com. "Our contention is they don't have the right to remove [them] from the bargaining unit" without negotiating with the union, says Marian V. Needham, director of contract administration for the Guild. "The dotcom work was done in our traditional bargaining units, and creation of a subsidiary is not sufficient to nullify their obligation to bargain."
Guild officials say they don't have an accurate number of newspapers where online workers are included in the bargaining unit because the status is changing so quickly. At some papers, Web employees have been covered under existing Guild contracts as part of the "routine evolution of the work," Needham says. Elsewhere, separate agreements have been reached, she says. Legal battles at the Providence Journal and Baltimore Sun ended with National Labor Relations Board decisions in support of the Guild, although the Sun is contesting the ruling.
"The companies' position is that employees have the right to decide" whether they want to be in the union, says Mary Sepucha, director of employee relations for the Newspaper Association of America.
In Detroit and Seattle, the unions are working with management to help turn around the results of union-led circulation boycotts and ease bitter feelings that remain after the strikes. As part of the Seattle strike agreement, the unions agreed to help rebuild circulation once all the workers were brought back. "What we're asking them to do is target the union families, which are the ones they targeted on the boycott," Blethen says. "Seattle's a big labor community, and they created a lot of lingering hostility toward the Times in that community.... Can they overcome that hostility? I hope they can do it, obviously." Still, he expresses doubt that the union can do any better than management has at shoring up sagging circulation.
In Detroit, the United Auto Workers announced it was ending its boycott against the News and Free Press in February, clearing the way for coin-operated boxes to go back into auto plants. Before the strike, those boxes accounted for 20,000 to 30,000 in circulation, says Free Press Publisher Heath Meriwether. "That was the key piece," he says, allowing the paper to work with the newspaper unions to try to rebuild circulation in the plants.
The new Detroit contract ties bonuses to substantial increases in circulation. Employees would get extra cash if combined sales at the News and Free Press rise by at least 100,000 by September. Still, an ongoing dispute over workers fired during the strike continues to hamper some rebuilding efforts; several Guild members have refused to appear in an advertisement for the papers until the issue is resolved.

ULTIMATELY, UNIONS MUST find ways to work with management to avoid strikes and improve leverage, says Foley. One big success story, she says, was the Guild's involvement in the recently completed joint operating agreement between the Denver Post and the Denver Rocky Mountain News.
The collaboration, which both Guild and management agree went extremely well, was prompted by the papers' owners, MediaNews Group and E.W. Scripps. On the day that executives William Dean Singleton and William R. Burleigh filed the JOA application at the Justice Department, they contacted leaders of the major unions representing newspaper workers, including Foley, whom they took to lunch at a downtown Washington, D.C., hotel.
MediaNews CEO Singleton and E.W. Scripps Chairman Burleigh asked Foley and the leaders of the CWA, Teamsters and Graphic Communications International Union for their active support in exchange for an attempt to negotiate new contracts with all the unions prior to the end of a deadline for interested parties to express their support or opposition to the JOA. If no agreement was in sight five days before the deadline, the unions could go ahead and protest. Traditionally, because of job losses and the possibility that one paper could eventually be closed, unions have bitterly opposed JOAs. Some observers have suggested that lingering acrimony over the Detroit JOA fueled the strike there.
"Both sides said they did not want another Detroit to happen," says Carol Green, vice president for human resources and labor relations at the Denver Newspaper Agency and a participant in the JOA contract negotiations.
Foley says she suspects that controversies over other JOAs, including one with the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and Advertiser, helped motivate the companies to extend their offer of cooperation. There, the union helped with a citizens' suit challenging Gannett's efforts to shut down the Star-Bulletin. A federal judge ordered that the paper had to be put up for sale, and a new owner is keeping it alive. (See "The Pulse of Paradise")
In Denver, Foley says at first she was skeptical, but ended up "very pleased." The unions "worked out contract language, jurisdictions...in addition, we got the companies to agree they wouldn't close one paper without putting it up for sale first. We didn't want to wind up with one paper in Denver," Foley says. "All of that played very well with the Justice Department, and it helped with the community perception," too.
Then-Attorney General Janet Reno signed the JOA on January 5, less than eight months after the application was filed. It was the fastest approval ever, Green says.
"Right now it appears to be the right thing to have done," says Tony Mulligan, administrative officer of the Denver Newspaper Guild and president of the Denver Council of Newspaper Unions. "Everybody's still here making more money."
From her perspective as longtime chief labor person at the Denver Post, Green says the collaboration was an evolution, not a turning point, in an increasingly constructive relationship between MediaNews Group and the unions.
"I just wish we could do that in more places," Foley says. "I think there are any number of these newspaper companies where that's possible. It's not just in areas like quid pro quo."
She sees the Guild working as a partner with management to provide employee training, strengthen ethics and public trust in journalism and improve literacy. "Often, our goals are not that different," she says.
At the Star, television columnist and 13-year employee Allan didn't join the Guild until a business writer at the paper was fired. Incensed at what he saw as an unfair action, he told union leaders that if they could get the writer a settlement, he'd join. He ran for president about five years ago at the request of a friend and won.
Allan says he is ambivalent about the job. He looks at the union as insurance, something you need but don't want to have to use. "It feels good on the rare occasions when I can help someone who is deserving," he says. "I hate it when I have to help someone I don't think pulled their weight."
Still, he thinks the presence of the union is the only way everyone can be treated fairly. "I'm held in enough esteem or in good enough standing that I don't really need a union. I think I would do well under a merit system," he says. But "our utility bills have doubled, the cost of gas is 50 percent higher than it was a year ago. I'm happy to forgo what I would make in a merit raise to make sure everybody gets something."
As the unions struggle to remake themselves, they ultimately will remain relevant as long as workers feel they need protection, says NYU's Serrin. "Who's gonna negotiate our raises? You have to protect the entire newsroom, not just those 10 or 15 stars, but the copy desk, the librarians, everybody."