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227 Chapter 11 Waiting for Justice: The Return to Work and the End of the Strike Conventional theories of how workers mobilize during strikes developed especially in the 1970s and 1980s in American social science. Such theories often argued that labor militancy in the postwar United States had been incorporated into a stable system of legal regulation. Researchers claimed that “strike action in the U.S. prior to the late 1940s occurred in a wholly different environment than did insurgency after this point in time,” as sociologist Holly McCammon notes. “During the late 1940s the context of workplace negotiations became ‘institutionalized.’ The U.S. state now granted workers a legal right to organize and bargain in the workplace and with this came a stabilization not only in union membership levels but also in the relationship between workers and employers.”1 Ironically, this view reached its fullest expression just as those historic institutional conditions were being radically undermined. Dramatic changes began to appear in the 1980s, leading to the substantial de-stabilization of unions and the ascendancy of the anti-union regime. Those changes did not occur overnight, and conflicting institutional norms continued to exist in different organizational contexts and locales. In the Detroit newspaper strike, this uneven process of institutional grating and displacement was illustrated in the long, drawn-out litigation surrounding the unfair labor practice charges. The unions actually won their case before an administrative law judge and on appeal at the NLRB in Washington, D.C., but lost crucial decisions before judges in U.S. district and federal appellate courts. The results highlighted the historic decay in the role of the NLRB and the return of judicial repression in U.S. labor relations. Conventional studies of strike mobilization also focused largely on behavior in the workplace and so gave little attention to action in the local 228 The Broken Table community or civil society. As unions began to turn to strategies of metro unionism, however, protest moved beyond the normal channels. Civil society gained renewed importance as an arena of conflict; in Detroit, for example, the largest single protest action occurred after the unions had offered to end the strike and return to work. If mobilization is no longer limited to formal channels, however, it is still not entirely free of any institutional ground. To achieve change, organizers must be able to pressure contending groups into some new framework or set of binding relationships . In Detroit, actors in the civic arena lacked access to effective regulatory mechanisms or leverage to compel the newspapers to respond, and the companies remained deaf to their appeals. Once the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions made the unconditional offer to return, the unions no longer had the economic weapon of the strike. Organizers had to find alternative means to sustain public awareness and support, and they did so spectacularly with the staging of the Action! Motown ’97 demonstration in June 1997. The event represented the peak of popular mobilization and coincided with the decision by the administrative law judge upholding the strikers’ unfair labor practice charges. Despite the popular show of solidarity, however, subsequent decisions by federal judges kept the campaign tied to an extended process of litigation. Mobilization continued, perhaps most notably in a spring 1998 community summit organized by religious and civic leaders. But as strikers slowly returned to work or otherwise dispersed, the unions were left with fewer options, especially after the U.S. Court of Appeals overturned the unfair labor practices case in 2000. Beaten but not broken, the unions finally settled contracts on management’s terms, and by the end of the year the newspaper strike was over. INSIDE GAME: THE UNCONDITIONAL OFFER TO RETURN On February 19, 1997, the News, the Free Press, and the DNA formally accepted the unions’ unconditional offer to return to work. Not surprisingly, however, the employers maintained their position that the walkout was economically motivated and not an unfair labor practice strike. Consequently , they refused to displace the replacements or take back more than a fraction of the returning strikers. “We will legally fight to the death to protect those people [the replacements],” declared News publisher Bob Giles, while at the Free Press executive editor Bob McGruder said that vacancies below the department head level were “just a handful—fewer than ten.”2 The newspapers continued to try to encourage strikers to seek employment elsewhere, and they again offered to create a $2 million retraining and relocation fund to help former strikers...

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