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

7. War of Position: The 1995 Contract Negotiations

129 129 Chapter 7 War of Position: The 1995 Contract Negotiations They knew it was not going to be easy. The leaders of the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions approached the 1995 negotiations warily, anticipating a struggle. They knew their power was not what it once was: the News and Free Press now enjoyed monopoly power in the DNA, while advances in technology had made it easier to produce and perhaps even deliver a newspaper during a strike. The 1992 contract had bought a provisional and uneasy peace, but relations on the job had since deteriorated, leading to numerous grievances and arbitrations. Now the newspapers were demanding more concessions, and militarized guards were beginning to assemble on the second floor of the Free Press building on Lafayette Street. At least one factor, however, was working in the unions’ favor: they were united. In the old days, organizational or personal rivalries would inevitably weaken or split apart the union coalition. The generation of leaders who came to the table in 1995, however, had developed an unusual trust in and solidarity with each other. “Our personalities just seemed to click, and for some reason, as the pressure increased, we got tighter instead of falling apart,” the press operators’ Jack Howe observed. “And we helped one another. We went to each other’s union meetings to explain what was going on with our own segments. We invited members from other locals to come to our meetings, and I mean it was a very open relationship with the council.”1 They would need all the help they could get. Conventional economic theory assumes that both management and unions engage in rational costbenefit calculation and act within standard institutional channels or routines . In brief, strikes occur because the parties simply fail to agree on well-defined issues at the bargaining table. As the events unfolded in De- 130 The broken Table troit, however, it became apparent that the two sides were really playing under very different sets of rules. Under the leadership of Gannett managers, the newspapers adopted the norms and logic of the postwar union avoidance path. In negotiations they deployed tactics of hard bargaining, impasse, and implementation in order to override the unions’ resistance to their demands. As in the Phelps Dodge and New York Daily News strikes, they made massive preparations to operate with replacement workers, and they radically intensified their security forces. Finally, they actively courted the command staff of the Sterling Heights Police Department to ensure their cooperation and neutralize the impact of any strike. By contrast, the unions remained committed to New Deal principles of collective bargaining. Convinced that their organizational survival was at stake, they ultimately chose to strike in a desperate effort to preserve their rights and protections under the old system. Deprived of the traditional mechanisms for reaching agreements, however, the unions also turned to alternative tactics, filing unfair labor practice charges to protect their right to strike and reaching out for public support through the circulation and advertising boycotts. The two sides began meeting in March 1995. They were unable to achieve a settlement before the previous contracts expired on April 30, however, and under a temporary extension the negotiations continued into the summer. As the talks began to break down in May and June, the unions filed unfair labor practice charges in three principal areas covering negotiations with the printers union, the Newspaper Guild, and the joint bargaining with the MCNU. When the strike finally began on July 13, it marked the opening of a signal juncture in the history of labor relations in the United States. harD barGaInInG: The STarT oF The 1995 neGoTIaTIonS The 1995 negotiations opened on a sharply antagonistic note, beginning with the Teamsters Local 2040 mailroom unit. In Local 2040’s first bargaining session with management on March 10, Gannett lead negotiator John Jaske announced that the DNA had tentatively concluded that unless mailroom productivity improved, it would shut down the $22 million inserting operation it had only recently installed at the Sterling Heights North Plant and outsource the work. Local 2040 leaders were surprised, but saw this as a monumental bluff. Immediately after the meeting, they sent an update to their members advising them to stay calm and to resist War of Position 131 the DNA’s attempts “to climb into all of their employees’ heads and steer them in whatever direction they want.”2 The...