The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor

5. The Path to Confrontation: The Newspapers' Joint Operating Agreement in Detroit

88 Chapter 5 The Path to Confrontation: The Newspapers’ Joint Operating Agreement in Detroit Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the business pages of American newspapers buzzed with talk of corporate restructuring, employment downsizing , and a new “lean” style of organization. Repeated waves of mergers and acquisitions made whole departments of large firms redundant as established companies reinvented themselves to maximize shareholder value, and managers and workers alike often scrambled to find their way on unfamiliar terrain.1 Social scientists and journalists have amply documented these dislocations, but under the free market ideology of the time they seemed somehow necessary and unavoidable, like the imposition of a law of nature. In fact, the changes taking place reflected the deliberate choices made by a range of actors, not all of whom shared the same interests. So it was in Detroit. The restructuring of the newspaper workplace under the joint operating agreement (JOA) was not an adaptation to an existing order, but an attempt to write the rules for a new one. At the outset, the lack of advance planning and cooperation made the implementation of the merger a nightmare, and despite its monopoly status the new enterprise failed to earn a profit in its first several years of existence. New actors entered the scene, representing opposing trends and tactics and opening the way to a more direct conflict at the bargaining table. As the pressure increased, it channeled the two sides toward an even larger confrontation. From the start, the negotiations for the JOA set a new tone in relations between the companies and the unions. In part, this reflected the cast of The Path to Confrontation 89 characters on both sides, particularly the new management leadership coming from Gannett. The interactions between the parties, however, also signaled emerging conflicts between deeper institutional forces that were played out in the nuts and bolts of bargaining strategy, contract enforcement , and labor law. The formation of the JOA put these forces in direct contact with one another, and the 1992 contract negotiations offered a preview of the collisions to come. CORPORATE RESTRUCTURING: THE NEWSPAPER AGENCY At the very least, Gannett’s arrival in Detroit inaugurated a change in the management culture at the News. With its national reputation for news reporting, a fiercely competitive urban market, and an 80 percent unionization rate among its employees (compared to 20 percent for Gannett as a whole), the News stood in sharp contrast with the other papers in its new parent company’s chain.2 Now Gannett and Knight-Ridder proposed to manage the business affairs of both the News and the Free Press under the joint operating agreement announced on April 14, 1986. The two papers would combine their production, circulation, advertising, accounting, and marketing operations into a single entity called the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA). Under the agreement, the newsrooms would remain separate, and on weekdays the Free Press would have exclusive rights to the morning edition while the News would publish in the afternoon. On weekends the papers would have a joint masthead, splitting coverage by departments but preserving independent editorial pages. Gannett would have a majority of three on the five-member DNA board, with two seats going to Knight-Ridder. For the first five years of the one-hundred-year agreement, Gannett would receive slightly more than half the profits, and after that they would be split evenly between the two national corporations. Gannett chair Allen Neuharth selected William J. Keating, Gannett’s general counsel and a former Republican congressperson from Cincinnati, to be the first chief executive officer of the DNA.3 Conflicts over the merger began even before the JOA was officially approved . Gannett and Knight-Ridder wanted as little union presence as possible in the new agency, but they expected to have to bargain with the Teamsters and the production crafts. They took a much harder stance, however, with the Newspaper Guild, which represented the newsrooms along with a group of janitorial workers at the News and more than three hundred advertising, circulation, marketing, and clerical jobs at the Free 90 The broken Table Press. Employees in the latter jobs would now be under the DNA, and Keating made it clear that management would oppose any effort by the union to represent them. It was not the first time the papers had stonewalled the Guild. Lou Mleczko (pronounced Muh-LETCH-ko) was president of the Guild’s...