STICKING WITH THE UNION?

It was a pretty good news day for a tabloid like the New York Daily News. On January 13, allied forces once again attacked Iraq and, on nearby Long Island, a ten-year-old girl was found imprisoned in a secret basement "dungeon" in the house of a male family friend. But in a smoky and dreary auditorium in Times Square, more than 200 members of The Newspaper Guild had a different story on their minds. A week earlier, Mortimer Zuckerman, the new owner and latest savior of the money-losing Daily News, had informed a third of the 540 guild-covered employees that they no longer had jobs. The firings were not done on the basis of seniority, and many longtime staffers were out on the street. Guild officials said the cuts involved nearly half of the union's shop stewards and three-quarters of its negotiating committee. And many of those who remained at the paper were asked to accept wage cuts. To the guild the message was clear: Zuckerman was trying to bust their union.

So it was not a happy group that gathered within the dark-brown walls of the Heywood Broun Room at the offices of the New York Newspaper Guild a week after the firings. When the standing-room-only crowd was told that the Reverend Al Sharpton, possibly the most controversial public figure in New York, supported them and would be willing, if necessary, to provide the manpower for a blockade of Daily News delivery trucks in Brooklyn, a cheer rose in the room.

"We're like a boxer in the fifteenth round of a fight who's been knocked down twice and even the manager wants to throw in the towel," said Juan Gonzalez, a columnist and guild activist who tried to stir the crowd. "But we've got to take it to the limit with this guy." Nevertheless, the discussion turned to buyout offers, severance battles, and medical insurance, and the meeting soon took on an air of resigned disgust. Gonzalez himself took a buyout offer from the News, but later changed his mind and stayed.

Even taking it to the limit with Zuckerman isn't likely to get many of the lost jobs back. The strategy devised in January involved a boycott of his publishing ventures (including U.S. News & World Report and The Atlantic), and attempts to dig up dirt on his significant real estate holdings. But these measures were designed primarily to force Zuckerman to negotiate a contract with the guild, rather than to get back the 180 jobs. It was clear that the new owner was holding most of the cards, since he already had deals with every other union at the paper -- ruling out the possibility of a successful strike by the guild.

Barry Lipton, president of the New York guild, acknowledges that his top priority at the News has become simply saving the guild unit at the paper. "It's an extraordinarily difficult position to be in," he said.

The Daily News situation is dramatic, but The Newspaper Guild is in an extraordinarily difficult position all over the map. Like most unions, it has been battered by unsympathetic political and economic conditions over the last decade or so. There is also plenty of criticism to be leveled at guild leadership; and there is now an unprecedented level of dissent within the industry's largest labor union. At the same time, the publishing industry is increasingly ruled by conglomerates whose bottom-line emphasis often means pushing the guild harder to accept big contract concessions.

Facing these and other challenges, many of which will only get tougher as the decade draws to a close. The Newspaper Guild is suffering through what is probably the greatest threat to its future since its founding by Broun and others in 1993.

The 1990s could see the demise of the guild or its rebirth. The challenge is essentially this: Can the union stop a dramatic decline in membership, revenues, and influence and find a vision and sense of mission that will help it succeed through the 1990s and beyond? There are several reasons the question must be asked, and answered, now.

* Guild membership in the United States and Canada hit a peak of 34,828 in 1987, but has declined rapidly ever since. Guild officials put the number at 31,000 in 1992 and admit that this year it could easily drop below that for the first time in twenty-five years.

* The guild has not organized a new shop of any significant size in the United States since 1989.

* During that time there has been a spate of decertifications of the guild at papers ranging from Tacoma, Washington, to Santa Barbara, California, to Great Falls, Montana.

* The decrease in membership has meant less revenues. The guild's international headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, shed four of its seventeen jobs last year due to budget constraints.

* Dissent is high, with two internal groups -- Concerned Guild Members and the Coalition for constructive Change -- seeking to oust existing leadership. In addition, the Southern Ontario local, a strong unit with 3,000 members, wants to leave the guild and affiliate with a Canadian labor union.

"What's missing is a more aggressive stance -- more aggressive in dealing with publishers and more aggressive in organizing," says Bruce Meachum, administrative officer for the Denver local of the guild and a founder of the Coalition for Constructive Change.

"The current guild leadership is not capable of leading the union in the future," says Gonzalez, a co-chair of Concerned Guild Members, the more activist of the two new insurgent groups. "It's not that they're evil or corrupt; they're just not very smart or capable."

"I think the guild is in danger of dying," says Gail Lem, president of the Southern Ontario local and the other chair of Concerned Guild Members. "The union is in a declining spiral."

The robust debate going on within the guild over its future is occurring at a time of increasing boldness among newspaper owners. Some tactics being used by publishers seem to be blatant attempts to break the union. Others reflect an intransigence designed to wear the guild down over lengthy negotiations. Both tactics seem to be at play in guild dealings with two of the large chains.

The guild has been trying since 1986 to negotiate its first contract with Gannett at The Cincinnati Enquirer, a unionized paper bought by Gannett in 1983. Union officials say negotiators simply won't budge on substantive issues. The situation was much the same at the Stockton, California, Record, another Gannett paper, where the guild was decertified in 1990 after more than fifty years of representation.

"Their policy is to bust The Newspaper Guild out of their papers," says the union's president, Charles Dale. Guild leaders say Gannett sends the same corporate team in to each contract negotiation; the team puts an offer on the table that includes, among other nettlesome issues, giving the company complete control over wages -- and then says the offer is final. Negotiations often drag on for years.

The Hearst Corporation is also aggressively pushing the guild and its members. After a long, tough newspaper war, the Hearst-owned San Antonio Light had finally started to give Rupert Murdoch's San Antonio Express-News a run for its money. But the Light's 180 guild-eligible employees ended up the losers: Hearst decided to buy the rival Express-News and, on January 27, it shut down the Light. Not surprisingly, the Express-News is nonunion.

Undoubtedly the nastiest battle the guild faced in the past year, however, was waged at the New York Daily News. Mort Zuckerman bought the paper in January from the estate of Robert Maxwell, the flamboyant British press lord who bought the paper in March 1991 and, a few months later, when his empire seemed about to collapse, drowned off his yacht. The Daily News sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection soon after Maxwell's death.

Under the terms of the sale, Zuckerman did not have to honor existing union contracts, but did have to recognize the ten existing unions representing Daily News employees, the three largest being the guild and the delivery drivers' and pressmen's unions. These and six other unions also belonged to the Allied Printing Trades Council, a longstanding labor alliance designed to promote solidarity among the News's unions.

Such an alliance came in handy before Maxwell bought the paper, when a five-month strike against the Tribune Company, longtime previous owners, succeeded in large part because of the union's ability to stick together.

When Zuckerman entered the bidding for the Daily News last year, it was clear that reaching agreement with the majority of the paper's unions would be a big obstacle to anyone's success. All the potential buyers made no secret of the need for big job reductions to turn the paper around. The question was which unions would take the biggest hits.

Zuckerman quickly displayed the business acumen that made him a wealthy real estate developer. He settled with the two key craft unions -- the pressmen and delivery drivers -- reportedly offering them small salary increases and/or bonuses, and only modest job reductions. With the union alliance shaken, and pressure from the bankruptcy judge for more contracts, the other craft unions soon reached settlements, some taking big job cuts.

By the end of last year, the guild was the only union without a contract, and Zuckerman was playing from a position of strength. He rejected proposals the guild put before him, informed the union that he wanted to cut a third of its members, and notified editorial and other guild employees that they would have to reapply for their jobs. Guild members were furious, and many directed their anger at Barry Lipton, head of the New York local, for getting them into such a position.

It can be argued that splintering within the guild unit at the Daily News over the past few years made it inevitable that Zuckerman would pick it out as the weak link in the labor chain at the paper. During the well-publicized strike in 1990-91, more than 200 guild members crossed picket lines. Many are still unhappy with Lipton and the way the union is run. "They fight the wrong way," says one former guild member at the News. "They're still wagging their dicks at these guys, when what you've really got to do is outsmart them."

Tonice Sgrignoli, a copy editor and active guild member who lost her job in Zuckerman's purge, says, "The guild's toes have to be held to the fire to serve us better. The leadership is mostly male, mostly white, and resistant to change."

The future of the entire union does not, of course, depend on any one shop -- even one is important as that of the News. What it does rest on is the ability of the guild to bring in members by organizing new shops. And that's something the union has not done well lately.

"When you get to organizing, you get to the heart of the frustration with the guild leadership," says Bernard Lunzer, administrative officer of the guild's Twin Cities local and a co-founder of the Coalition for Constructive Change. "I don't think there's a clear idea within the guild of how to go about organizing. We haven't done a very good job."

William McLeman, director of field operations for the guild and the man most responsible for organizing, says the union's energy in recent years has often been spent trying to increase membership at papers that already have a guild contract, or dealing with crisis situations where the guild is threatened. "There are a lot of fires we've been putting out over the past few years," he says.

This has troubled some members. "You can't go out and organize when you're telling people that all you're doing is putting out fires," says Meachum of the Coalition for Constructive Change. "They don't want to be another fire."

It is startling to realize that most of the successful guild organizing efforts in recent years have been result of hard work by union activists who are openly critical of current leadership.

Gail Lem has shepherded at least six such efforts in Canada over the past five years, but she is also one of the guild's most outspoken critics, especially since letting it be known last year that her 3,000-member local wants to leave the union and affiliate with a larger Canadian labor organization. "The guild is too small," says Lem. "The economies of scale are not there."

Nevertheless, the guild has enjoyed some success in Canada recently, including winning a thirty-one-day strike at The Toronto Star last summer. Its record in the United States is another story. There have been unsuccessful efforts to begin or extend guild representation in Detroit, Pittsburgh, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. And there have been several decertifications. One of the most painful was at the Santa Barbara News-Press, where last September employees voted thirty-one to twenty-three to disband the union after just two years of guild representation. Before that, the paper had had an in-house union for twenty-five years.

An anonymous group of former guild members wrote a column in the January issue of The Nation that charged, "The Guild had no strategy for winning a contract. From the start, it was old-style bargaining. Sit and talk. Sit and talk -- and get nowhere. Sit and talk and get humiliated and go back for more. . . . Here's what we 'won' in a year at the table: the right to take eye breaks from the computer terminal if we agreed not to stop working. The right to three month's probation instead of six if we agreed to let the company extend it in certain cases. The right to take the day off on Martin Luther King's birthday if we gave up another holiday.

"Here are some of our proposals that were flatly rejected: job sharing, a work week shorter by half an hour a day, unpaid paternal leave, computer health and safety training, and the right, enjoyed by more than 90 percent of the union workers in this country, to submit disputes in the workplace to an arbitrator."

Ironically, the largest new shop organized by the guild in the U.S. in the past five years was the Los Angeles Daily News, part of the same local that lost the Santa Barbara paper. The executive officer in the Los Angeles local is Jim Smith, who is also active in Concerned Guild Members. "We did it [organized the Los Angeles Daily News]," he says, "with the international kicking and screaming all the way."

Now, Smith has fixed his sights on a more ambitious target, the Los Angeles Times, the largest nonunion newspaper in the country, with 1,100 editorial employees. But Smith and the international arm of the union do not see eye to eye. "By any objective standard you could say we have a live organizing campaign," says smith, adding that at the end of last year he had an organizing committee of more than fifty people from among Los Angeles Times editorial employees.

But the international says that is far short of what is needed to assure the success of such a massive campaign. "If you can't get ten percent of the people in a shop to commit to an organizing campaign, you're going to lose," says John Edgington, the guild's secretary-treasurer, citing a common rule of thumb in union organizing. "There's no question we would love to organize the L.A. Times. I don't think the time is ripe, however."

Last fall the guild asked Smith to put together an organizing committee of 100 at the Times, and gave him two months to do it. When he got only half that number, the union withdrew its support for the effort, which continues to be funded entirely by the Los Angeles local.

Ron Soble, a writer at the Times, is among those men who think the guild needs to be a bit more flexible in its expectations of the first organizing campaign at the paper. With the Times reeling from a new-found austerity since Otis Chandler left the publisher's office, employees are confronting massive job reductions, forced transfers, and talk of pay freezes for the first time in the paper's history.

"There's an active core [of union activists] at the Times in all sections," says Soble. "That never would have happened three or four years ago." Jim Smith gets downright gleeful when he talks about what a successful organizing campaign at the Times could mean to the guild. "It would put the guild back on the map," he says, nothing that other large nonunion papers, such as the Chicago Tribune and The Miami Herald, might then become viable targets for the union.

Despite Smith's optimism, forming a union at the Los Angeles Times will be tough. Eric Malnic, a thirty-five-year Times veteran, says that the paper has always been able to beat back attempts to unionize editorial employees. And while there is considerable unhappiness over belt-tightening measures, Malnic says, "I've in no way sensed a groundswell of support to join the union."

There's is no question that the guild needs to pick its fights carefully and that tough judgment calls will have to be made. But there's also no question that in the absence of other visible or significant organizing initiatives, the decision to withdraw support from the Time's effort gives ammunition to guild critics who see the union as lacking in energy and decisiveness.

One issue which the guild feels it has been decisive about is the growing problem of repetitive strain injuries (RSI). But while it has supplied educational material, lobbied federal agencies and legislators, and written about the problem at length in the union newspaper, some guild members complain that little of that effort has translated into pressure on publishers or contract language.

At The New York Times, where the incidence of RSI has exploded since a new ATEX computer system was installed in many departments in 1991 (an estimated 100 Times writers and editors are affected), the guild has been "slower than the company" to respond, says Don Bacheller, a guild shop steward at the paper.

Bacheller says he gave recommendations in February of last year to the new York guild calling for mandatory rest breaks, increases in the number of work stations, and other measures aimed at reducing RSI at the Times. "They didn't meet with the company until September," says Bacheller of the guild leadership in New York. "They didn't even ask for a meeting until summer."

John Kifner and Leslie Wayne, two prominent Times writers who were unable to type for most of 1992 as a result of RSI, agree that the union has done little to address the problem. "The guild has been absolutely useless," says Wayne. "I haven't seen them as a presence on this issue at all."

In fairness, the guild does not exactly enjoy its strongest participation at the Times, which may hamper its ability to get things done. Bacheller points out that when he came to the Times sixteen years ago there was a shop steward on every desk, totaling roughly a dozen. Today, he notes, there are only three.

"The guild suffers particularly from a lack of member involvement" at the Times, says Bacheller, who adds that many Times writers worry that union activism may hinder their careers. But Bacheller also faults union officials for not cultivating activism. "Despite what the leadership tells you, they don't want more member involvement," he says, because it threatens their role in directing the union.

Union leaders vehemently deny this, but the perception persists. "The guild has become increasingly irrelevant to us. It's a bunch of old-timers and you can't break in," says Leslie Wayne.

The lack of participation in guild activities by rank-and-file members, along with growing internal dissent, may be the biggest challenge the guild faces over the next decade. The current generation of journalists entering the workforce has little experience with or affinity for the tradition of organized labor.

"The guild has a problem with a whole lot of reporters who've gone through college or journalism school, wear suits and ties, and don't see that they have anything in common with labor," says Walter Brasch, a journalism professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania and author of With Just Cause: Unionization of the American Journalist. "But if they look at it, journalists have more in common with pipefitters than with publishers."

Perhaps they do, but it's a comparison many young journalists are unwilling to make in their quest for career fulfillment, a fact that irks guild officials. "The reality is that a hell of a lot of the people who have entered this industry in recent years have benefitted markedly by the efforts of The Newspaper Guild," says president Dale. "The guild was created because conditions in this industry sucked."

The guild improved these conditions and, says Walter Brasch, "brought an awareness that the reporter has a central role in the industry." Throughout the 1960s, '70s, and early '80s, the guild negotiated strong contracts for members at dozens of papers, helping journalists reach a comfortable middle-class standard of living. Even at papers without guild representation, salaries and benefits often improved to keep employees from organizing.

Despite the current tumult within the union, the average top minimum salary for a guild-covered reporter is $ 36,074 a year and rising, according to the union. This compares with average pay for an experienced reporter at U.S. papers of $ 30,816 and falling, according to a survey by the Newspaper Association of America.

"The guild does have a lot of problems, but it is worth fighting for," says guild dissident Bruce Meachum. "Of all the unions I've been involved with, or know of, I think the guild is the best."

Ironically, past success may be hurting the guild today. "We make a lot of our members very happy -- and complacent," says the guild's John Edgington. Meanwhile, says Gonzalez, "Guild leadership, like most union leadership, is stuck in the 1950s in their ways of approaching management." Concerned Guild Members has issued a platform to shake up the union. It includes making new organizing the guild's top priority, encouraging more rank-and-file involvement, ending concession bargaining, and addressing the problem of repetitive strain injuries. But the list is short on specific strategies.

"I have no idea what the hell any of these people would do differently if they were in power," says Dale.

Still, there is evidence that a lot of people within the union would at least like to try. At last year's convention in Chicago, guild delegates approved funding for a strategic planning study to help clarify a vision for the union's future. The move was approved over the objections of the International Executive Board, which was concerned about its cost -- estimates exceed $ 100,000 -- in a time of dwindling resources. All sides hope it will answer important questions about the guild's priorities and its chances of surviving.

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