The Message from Motor City

Every once in a while the folks in Detroit cast an envious eye across Lake Erie to Cleveland, a city that has been enjoying a business and commercial renaissance. If Cleveland can have a new baseball stadium, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and the image of a city that is turning its fortunes around, why not Detroit?

Add another item to the list that feeds Detroit's Cleveland envy: a decade of guaranteed of labor peace between The Plain Dealer and the newspaper's 900 unionized employees. As Detroit was in the fourteenth month of its bitter and financially debilitating newspaper strike, The Plain Dealer and its unions announced last September a stunning breakthrough in newspaper labor/management relations - eight ten-year contracts and one fourteen-year pact covering the paper's major bargaining units.

The contracts are "eloquent testimony to the mutually respectful and mature relationships we have with the unions,'' Plain Dealer publisher Alex Machaskee said. "It's a first class contract," is the way Carmen Parise, secretary-treasurer of Teamsters Local 473, describes the deal.

 True, the issues in Cleveland were not the same. But were the unions in Cleveland casting a thoughtful gaze on Detroit? Sure, says Parise, who negotiated on behalf of 500 production and circulation employees. With or without Detroit, however, he insists, a strike would never have made sense. "As long as the employer has the ability to replace the worker," Parise says, "it is pure suicide to go out."

So what's the lesson in Detroit for other big-city papers? It may be too early for final judgments, especially since some important allegations of unfair labor practices need to be resolved by the National Labor Relations Board and the federal courts.

But the legacy may be that labor and management can only on rare occasions afford a strike in an unforgiving media environment that newspapers no longer dominate. The unions are surely losers in Detroit - even with an NLRB victory, they've lost some 600 jobs - yet it is difficult to declare Knight-Ridder and Gannett the winners. Detroit Newspapers, the entity that runs the two newspapers in that city, has lost at least $120 million in revenue, dropped 30 percent of circulation, and suffered an imponderable blow to its greatest local asset: goodwill in the community.

"I'm not sure what the strike accomplished. I hope it doesn't hasten the demise of another newspaper," says Jim Naughton, former executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer and now president of the Poynter Institute. "Companies are probably more emboldened as a result of the Detroit strike to take a stand, but more sobered at the same time by the size of the risk involved."

Naughton says Detroit clearly influenced the 1995 labor negotiations in Philadelphia, because neither side wanted to take that kind of risk. Such caution, he predicts, will extend to other bargaining tables at other newspapers. "I would be surprised if union negotiators are not being much more careful about drawing the line in the sand. It's not that there isn't a line to be drawn, but where and when is a much more serious matter now."

Negotiations at the Chicago Sun-Times, tentatively set to begin in May, could test the lessons of Detroit. The tabloid is owned by Hollinger International Inc., a newspaper subsidiary controlled by the Canadian publisher Conrad Black, who has earned a reputation as a harsh critic of unions.

The Sun-Times is a financially healthier paper than when Black bought it in 1994, although it still lags far behind the high-profit performance of Black's other publications. The unions authorized a strike three years ago, but it was averted with the signing of a contract. Since then, Hollinger has acquired, among other suburban papers, the Daily Southtown. While no one is talking strike now, Hollinger could call upon the workforce from its suburban newspapers if one occurred.

Jerry Minkkinen, executive director of the Chicago Newspaper Guild Local 71, has his mind firmly on talking, not walking. "Nobody is cocky," he says, "Nobody wants to see a strike." Will Detroit have an impact on Chicago? "I don't know," Minkkinen adds. "In the long haul, I can't see any rational analysis that would give management any hope or encouragement of entering into a dispute. Both newspapers in Detroit have lost credibility in addition to losing a helluva lot of money."

The Detroit strike was unique, for several reasons, not the least of which were management's inability to turn faster profits from the 1989 joint operating agreement and labor's frustration at not getting what it considered its fair share of profits after earlier sacrifices. The depth of the pockets of the Gannett and Knight-Ridder are also unique. Detroit was different, and so, says Linda Foley, president of The Newspaper Guild, is every other bargaining situation.

"We've had several major contract settlements since the Detroit strike started," Foley says. "The Boston Globe, The Associated Press." She points to the 1994 newspaper strike in San Francisco, where the unions won much of what they wanted. "But did we all of a sudden start getting great contracts across the country? No. Every situation takes on a life of its own."

 Indeed, each major newspaper strike in this decade - in New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, and Detroit - was unique in its own way, and different in outcomes. The unions could claim victory in San Francisco and New York. In Pittsburgh, which had two newspapers when the strike began, The Pittsburgh Press closed. The message from Detroit says this strike failed, but it does not mean all strikes will fail.

Detroit, in fact, may have merely confirmed what Parise and others in the industry have thought for years - that newspaper strikes, which peaked in number thirty years ago, before technology shifted the bargaining advantage to management, are extremely risky ventures for all concerned.

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