The crowd had already swelled to 3,000, drawing 300 police officers from more than 20 law enforcement agencies to the newspaper plant where strikers refused to leave.
Late into that September night in 1995 at the suburban plant outside Detroit, strikers returned pepper spray from police with bricks, bottles and cans – whatever refuse was lying around. There was a paper to get out, but the strikers wouldn’t leave, and police wouldn’t clear the way for delivery trucks to leave the plant. Picketers had already broken the windshields of several trucks that had tried. But there was a paper to get out.
Most newspaper strikes in American history didn’t have the newsroom’s support, let alone their participation, but that was not the case in pro-labor Detroit. The crowd, made up of reporters and pressmen alike, was protesting The Detroit News, then owned by Gannett, and The Detroit Free Press, then owned by Knight-Ridder, in a strike that would stretch on for 19 brutal months. The two dailies had for years printed together under the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA), an operation owned and run jointly by the two newspaper chains and deeply connected to events leading up to the strike.
Late into the night, DNA Chief Financial Officer Gary Anderson and Gannett negotiator John Jaske struggled to manage the situation at the plant, but finally a backup plan percolated: While the crowd blocked the factory’s main entrance on Mound Road, DNA essentially would sneak out through the back, which in this case was a gate onto 16 Mile Road that was far enough away from the din that they had a chance of making a break for it.
Aside from the fact that this went against their agreement with police, the only problem with the scheme was the gate itself. Strikers had taken chains and a padlock to the 10-feet-high and 30-feet-long gate.
At their wit’s end by 4 a.m., Anderson and Jaske made the call. They would use a truck like a battering ram, charging their own gate in order to break the chains and clear the way.
Strikers and company men disagreed on how quickly the truck drove into the gate, but the result was clear cut. The gate collapsed, injuring a Teamster union member and blocking the trucks inside the plant for four more hours.
Hundreds of strikers waded into the area, smashing more windshields and stalling the critical Sunday delivery until 8:30 in the morning. The delivery trucks finally left from Mound Road.
Work stoppages are a stark contrast to the frenzied pace of the news industry, which expects its journalists to work at high-level speed and skill across all forms of media while their salaries stagnate and their resources taper off.
It’s no secret journalists have a lot of workplace grievances. Even before enduring what’s become a spirited bout of anti-media sentiment, journalists were locked into an industry long assaulted by corporatization, an industry where media empires sprouted out of bottomless hungers for cannibalizing local media properties. On top of that, the internet wreaked havoc on business strategies that over-relied on advertising for decades.
Many who enter the journalism industry in their idealistic 20s have wondered for years if it’s a legitimate career path by the time they’ve reached their 30s, if they’ve even stuck with it for that long. For journalists, the bouquet garni of traditional career milestones are the first time their annual salary cracks $30,000; the first time their job absorbs another job, creating twice the work for the same, crummy salary; and their first layoff – either losing their job and regrouping in every sense of the word or surviving cuts only to work in a newsroom that could double as a graveyard.
Magnify that experience by the 88,000 newsroom workers left in the industry as of 2017, a 23 percent drop from 2008, according to Pew Research Center, and the current movement to unionize makes perfect sense. Although the push began exclusively with national, digital media properties in 2015, it swiftly expanded into community newspapers across the country.
Gawker, the now-defunct website and original flagship property of Gizmodo Media Group, was the first to unionize. Unlike a mass of publications that kept such conversations behind closed doors, Gawker’s newsroom staff posted their personal thoughts on the union drive to an open thread available to the public.
“That was one of those things that to outsiders, it looked like chaos and it looked like madness, but to anybody who understood the culture of the place, actually, that was a sign this was going smoothly,” said Tommy Craggs, who was executive editor during Gawker’s union drive.
In Gawker’s case, its founder, Nick Denton, appeared to respect his staff’s right to unionize.
“While he maybe didn’t care about the grievances of somebody making $40,000 a year all that much,” Craggs said, “I think he understood in an abstract way what was happening in digital media, how the precarity that he had taken advantage of and in some ways … certainly capitalized on, why there might be a response to that in the form of organizing.”
Craggs went on to work for Slate, where he was laid off while organizing a union drive. Slate’s top editor at the time, Julia Turner, who now is The Los Angeles Times deputy managing editor for arts and entertainment coverage, didn’t respond to an interview request.
Millennials who grew up without the vocabulary for collective bargaining and veteran reporters who watched the industry wane in real time have reached a point where frustrations with working conditions have exceeded their trust that the companies that own their little corner of the internet will step in to help.
Corporations that own community newspapers never lay claim to being great places to work. At times, they don’t even make a show of respecting their employees. Newspaper chain Gatehouse Media announced it had purchased The Oklahoman from Denver-based Anschutz Corporation last September, then forced staff to listen to a presentation on the acquisition for more than a half hour before Publisher Chris Reen shared that the company had already sent emails to workers to let them know they’d been selected for layoffs. If you got an email, it went into effect immediately. About 40 positions were cut in all.
Media companies with properties in local and national news markets have argued against unionization or taken tactical steps against it, at times laying off workers during union drives or shuttering entire sites or newspapers during or after unionization.
Given the companies’ power to squelch union activity, realized or not, it’s worth asking if newsrooms have full access to a range of bargaining tools – including strike. It’s especially relevant considering that unions sometimes opt for weak contracts because they doubt they can successfully strike for better terms. Cet Parks of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild told Splinter last year that was why the union was pulling for a less than ideal contract.
Ever since journalists first unionized during the Great Depression, most newspaper strikes were carried out by trade unions that had far greater clout than the newsroom’s Newspaper Guild, which now goes by NewsGuild. Trade unions made up of pressmen, photoengravers and typographers could literally stop the presses. Even though they could at any time put down their pens and walk out, reporters have never been regarded as having that ability.
There isn’t a modern precedent for strikes in the journalism industry and certainly no game plan for how to launch one in a way that would increase a union’s leverage without leaving workers completely screwed.
Since Detroit’s strike about 20 years ago, journalists have rarely participated in work stoppages. A few notable attempts include a 2017 walkout at the New York Times that ended after about 20 minutes, a lunchtime walkout at Slate a few months ago and the “electronic picket line” that writers hopped over on their way to submit to HuffPost in 2011.
The use of strikes dropped across every industry in 1981 after President Ronald Reagan fired striking air traffic controllers before hiring their permanent replacements. The incident raised public acceptance of employers hiring replacement workers during strikes in an effort to dodge negotiations and suppress work stoppages.
In the 1970s, before the air traffic controllers were fired, workers carried out an average of 289 major work stoppages a year. By the 1990s, there were an average of 35 a year, and in 2017, there were seven in all, the second lowest number on record, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The two most prominent journalism unions, NewsGuild and the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE), have expressed openness to using strike as a bargaining tool, but incentives to strike are small given the risks.
“I think journalists generally feel like they don’t have a lot of leverage these days,” said Dave Jamieson, labor reporter for HuffPost. “So many newspapers have been downsizing or simply vanishing that I think it makes people feel like they simply don’t have a lot of leverage to pull off a big strike.”
NewsGuild President Bernard J. Lunzer said the union will never take striking off the table, but it should be reserved only for scenarios where there are no other options. WGAE declined an interview for this story, but its executive director, Lowell Peterson, told Steven Greenhouse in the Columbia Journalism Review last year that the guild has considered striking “various digital companies, before finally reaching contract deals.”
Union drives are less extreme and less controversial than strikes. Still, heads of news sites and local papers alike swear against unions, claiming they’ll hurt their bottom line.
In 2015, Upworthy co-founder Eli Pariser said unionizing would cripple the site’s ability to raise capital. Publications like DNAInfo-Gothamist and The Missoula Independent in Montana shut down amid union drives.
Labor experts contend that the internet didn’t hurt the newspaper industry as much as the growth of hedge fund management. Companies like Gatehouse and Digital First Media slash and burn their way through local newspapers for higher dividends, but many newspapers at their heart remain profitable.
Empire State College-SUNY Associate Professor of Labor Studies Richard Wells and others following the industry hold that the problem is this: For decades, corporations managing media businesses have invested not in their workforce or their product, but in buying and consolidating newspapers and keeping profit margins as high as possible. Whether or not reporters unionize or strike, for that matter, is moot.
“It’s always easy for any private corporation … to say the bottom line’s struggling, and where do they look first?” Wells said. “At labor, but there’s often other things going on that are impacting the bottom line that they’re unwilling to discuss.”
In 2017, Mic’s editorial staff voted to join NewsGuild after a layoff of 25. In November last year, the site laid off its entire staff before selling to Bustle Digital Group.
“That didn’t happen because those folks unionized,” Jamieson of HuffPost said. “In fact, they didn’t have a contract yet, so their union campaign hadn’t cost their employer anything. I think this idea that unionizing is going to kill the field is a bit ridiculous, and it’s obviously not what we’ve seen.”
The Wrap reported last week that Mic had broken a publishing hiatus with posts written by non-union writers.
About 2,500 workers from six different unions, including NewsGuild, struck The Detroit Free Press, The Detroit News and their joint production arm, DNA. Throughout what became the longest newspaper strike of the era, the papers continued to publish, even if the editions were thin and anchored with wire copy. At one point, DNA made the grand gesture of airlifting newspapers from its production plant by helicopter.
To keep publishing during the strike, DNA and the newspapers hired replacement workers. Early into the strike, The Free Press threatened to permanently replace its picketing reporters, leading three dozen journalists to return to work, while others continued to strike.
A few months into the strike, the papers began hiring newsroom replacements, who tended to be less experienced than their predecessors. During one five-month stretch, The Detroit News hired four times more journalists than it had hired in the entire year leading up to the strike.
The picketing got violent, with more than 200 workers fired for strike-related misconduct that included assaulting or threatening people who crossed the picket line, as well as acts of vandalism. At one point, a replacement worker drove through a crowd of strikers, and police found a loaded crossbow sitting under a towel in his front seat. A pipe bomb planted in a newspaper rack exploded. A Teamster member found a Molotov cocktail on his porch.
Chris Rhomberg, an associate sociology professor at Fordham University and author of a book about the Detroit strike called “The Broken Table,” believes the violence could have been prevented had the companies not hired permanent replacements. He cited a study by economists Peter Cramton and Joseph Tracy that found replacement workers were used in half of contract negotiations that involved major violence.
“You can just picture it,” Rhomberg said. “You now have two workforces. One is in the building, one is on the sidewalk, and it’s just an invitation to violence.”
Detroit journalists lacked across-the-board support for their striking colleagues. One newsroom posted a sign that read: “Twice the Work, Half the People, None of the Whining.” Angry that the union had set a strike deadline, the managing editor for The Detroit News tore down notices from the NewsGuild’s bulletin board and slipped union flyers out of journalists’ mail slots. Both acts broke federal law.
The strike had started with the unions opting to walk out rather than take unacceptable buyout offers. It ended with them taking even worse terms and with DNA planning to rehire strikers “as opportunities (arose).”
“We need a system … that doesn’t make it an all or nothing struggle every time workers try to have a voice in their workplace and improve the conditions for a company,” Rhomberg said, “to try to pursue a high road, rather than a low road.”
When all was said and done, Knight-Ridder and Gannett spent an estimated $40 million on private security during the strike and more than $1 million to cover police overtime. Just in the first six months of the strike, the papers lost a combined $90 million. The unions ran effective subscription and advertising boycotts, and from 1995 to 1999, the city’s circulation fell eight times lower than the industry average.
The workers who didn’t lose their jobs still lost provisions in their contracts that they never recovered.
“Overall, what the strike proved to both the employers and to the unions was that in a case where everyone kind of digs into their trenches and decides to just go to war, everyone loses,” said Lunzer, who served as NewsGuild’s secretary-treasurer in Detroit during the strike.
Union membership is a rarity in the United States’ private sector, where fewer than 7 percent of workers are union members, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Union membership has a direct impact on income, with nonunion workers earning a fifth less than workers in unions, according to the bureau.
Even at legacy newspapers that one source described as “unioned up,” full union participation doesn’t exist. Less than half of The Washington Post’s employees belong to its union, for instance.
In Nebraska, reporters learned last summer through a Bloomberg story that Warren Buffet-headed Berkshire Hathaway had signed over management of its papers in 30 markets, including the Omaha World-Herald, to Lee Enterprises. Berkshire Hathaway didn’t respond to a request for comment.
“We felt more or less, kind of, protected, and then this happened,” said Blake Ursch, features reporter for the World-Herald. “… A lot of people felt like Buffett had more or less, like, washed his hands of us.”
After Lee began managing the paper, veteran reporters were asked to retire as the newsroom faced layoffs on top of layoffs from earlier in the year. Lee declined comment for this story.
Motivated by concerns about Lee’s management, an idea passed between a small mix of millennial and seasoned reporters. They put together an organizing committee that rallied a 71-to-5 vote to unionize – all within four months.
“That was huge,” Ursch said of the sweeping majority vote. “It’s been just a big unifying force for all of us in the newsroom, because you have something to work towards all of the sudden.”
While the World-Herald union was banning together, Lee was abruptly shutting down one of its own alt-weeklies five months after it had voted to form a union of about 10.
After Lee bought The Missoula Independent from Matt Gibson in 2017, the company contracted its printing out to local daily The Missoulian, which Lee also owns, then moved several positions from the Indy to The Missoulian building. Gibson became general manager for Lee’s Missoula newspapers.
In February last year, Lee told staff that the company planned to move the Indy into The Missoulian’s office, sparking concerns that Lee’s long-term goal was consolidation of the papers.
“I think that move made us question what the long-term vision for the paper was, and there weren’t answers to those questions,” said Derek Brouwer, a former reporter for the Indy.
As the staff contemplated unionizing, Gibson wrote an email to advertisers addressing the possibility. He said forming a union was against the best interests of the paper, the community, Lee and the staff itself.
“I understand their anxieties, and I respect their right to organize, but I think that impulse is naïve and extremely shortsighted. … When it’s all said and done,” Gibson wrote, “the organizing effort amounts to a dramatic gesture to take some sort of principled stand, but there’s no substance to it.”
Gibson claimed the union would hurt the paper’s business interests and local journalism, and he pledged to attempt to dissuade staff from forming the union.
Nonetheless, the editorial staff of nine unanimously voted to form a union, and by June, they had drafted a proposal asking for improved benefits but also to keep the editorial departments for the two newspapers separate. Lee responded a month later with a proposal to outsource everything but the newsroom and to either undergo layoffs or shut down the paper.
On a Tuesday morning in September, Indy staff learned the paper had shut down before the workday even began. The move was abrupt, moreso considering everything had been in place for the next issue. Lee deleted the paper’s social media accounts and essentially salted the earth by replacing its website archive with a redirect to the Missoulian’s homepage.
The impact of a community newspaper can’t be quantified, but that hasn’t stopped people from trying. Last month, an episode of National Public Radio’s podcast Hidden Brain examined the relationship between newspaper closures and interest rates. The show cited research that found interest rates for loans go up after newspapers shut down, due to an increased risk of local government corruption when there aren’t journalists around to play watchdog.
Dan Brooks, a freelance reporter and former columnist for the Indy, said that’s his biggest concern, that the loss of the Indy equates a loss in accountability.
“I think that city and county government are going to be able to get away with a lot in the absence of the Indy because, you know, local television news is not performing that function, and The Missoulian, their staff is overworked,” he said. “They’re putting out the same paper with a smaller staff, and I don’t think they’re in a position to devote resources to longform, long-term investigative journalism.
“It’s a bonanza for low-level, small town corruption.”
Although Brouwer, who has since joined the staff of Vermont alt-weekly Seven Days, admits it’s possible the union drive factored into Lee’s decision to shut down the Indy, he has no regrets.
“In my view, these corporate media companies aren’t going to change their way of doing business unless they’re forced and pressured to, and I think that pressure can’t just come from the reading public,” he said. “I think it also has to come from the people who work at those companies.”
Gibson, who left Lee to serve as executive director of the Montana Newspaper Association, declined an interview but provided a statement that said: “Closing the Indy was a terrible outcome for everybody involved and a loss for Missoula. But faced with steep operating losses and a fundamentally adversarial relationship with employees, management had few viable options.”
Gibson’s statement went on to say that the alternative to shutting down the Indy would have been to make cuts elsewhere in Lee’s group of Missoula-area properties, such as The Missoulian or The Ravalli Republic.
“With dwindling resources for local reporting, that would have been an even more painful, destructive course for the community,” Gibson wrote.
Although the outcomes of Brouwer and Ursch’s union activity run short on parallels, both reporters know why they got involved.
“I think you can’t trust the companies to look out for the product,” Ursch said. “I mean, they’re out to make money. That’s their job, so putting up any kind of road block to making it harder for them to race to the bottom is the only thing you can do.”
Lunzer said journalists get that they care more about the product than the owners.
“These workers represent a new … recognition that the future of journalism is in the hands of journalists themselves,” he said. “And they want a voice in their newsrooms and in what happens with the product.”
A cross-industry union drive hasn’t triggered a cheery commitment to quality for everyone. In 2017, businessman Joe Ricketts shut down the DNAinfo-Gothamist family of sites a week after they voted to join the WGAE. Ricketts didn’t mince words. The sites were closed because of the union.
Since journalists first began to unionize in the 1930s, the business end ventured into the realm of union busting. The Associated Press fired a reporter named Morris Watson for pro-union activity, leading to a 1937 Supreme Court case in which the publishers claimed that federal laws protecting workers’ right to unionize violated their First Amendment rights of freedom of the press, a notion the court rejected.
A year after that ruling, the Chicago Herald-Examiner and Chicago Evening American fired multiple union supporters in order to kill a union drive. Instead, they caused a 15-month strike. Drivers working for the management beat Guild strikers with clubs and rubber hoses and beat a Guild officer as he came home. Management lackeys stole the Guild’s membership files and pushed cars belonging to a Guild officer and the union into the Chicago River.
As it was, reporters were late to organize. Columnist Heywood Broun founded the Newspaper Guild in 1933 after editorial workers took a greater Depression-era pay cut than their trade union peers who were protected by collective-bargaining agreements. The NewsGuild was the first successful national union for white-collar workers, but Broun in part wanted it to be called a “guild” in order to lose the blue-collar association journalists had with unions.
That conflict between union activity and journalists’ identities – as a professional class, but also as purveyors of news, which is dually a public service – never went away. Union loyalty made for an awkward fit with journalists’ greater loyalties to their profession and to their newspapers as institutions.
In 1975, pressmen for The Washington Post destroyed its presses in an effort to prevent the paper from printing during their planned strike. Unknown to them, Post executives had already trained in secret to operate printing machinery during a visit to Oklahoma City. The newsroom didn’t support the strike or honor the picket line, either, partially because of the vandalism, but also because of loyalty to the management.
“Many Post reporters also say they do not see themselves as ordinary working people,” Martin Arnold wrote in The New York Times during the strike. “One said, ‘We go to the same parties as management. We know Kissinger, too.’”
Washington-based New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that the strike was about the right to print, going further to say that the vandalism showed that collective bargaining and the First Amendment were at risk.
If striking journalists are a threat to the First Amendment, the logical hop, skip and jump is that strikes in the newspaper industry threaten Democracy itself. That line of reasoning landed in the Notre Dame Law Review, where former general counsel for the National Labor Relations Board Stuart Rothman wrote in 1964 that “by interrupting the flow of news,” newspaper strikes “thwart the processes of a free society.”
Reporters privileged by real or perceived intimacy with Henry Kissinger are nonetheless part of an institution that touts itself as being vital to democracy, even when public service comes in second place to the industry’s business interests.
During the epic New York strike that affected publication at eight newspapers for 114 days from 1962 to 1963, Reston strongly rejected the goals of the work stoppage, possibly influenced by his close relationship with publishers for both the Times and Washington Post. When the Times rejected his column, Reston wrote in The New Republic that strikes “may be an acceptable situation in a meat factory or a steel mill, but newspapers are not pork chops or iron fences.”
That sentiment would have resonated with BuzzFeed Founder Jonah Peretti, who said something similar half a century later while maintaining that a union wasn’t right for the online publication.
“I think unions have had a positive impact on a lot of places, like if you’re working on an assembly line,” he said during a company meeting, noting that in such cases, “if you’re negotiating with management it can make a huge difference, particularly when labor is more replaceable.”
Peretti brought forward the idea that unions would inhibit the company and that workers negotiating salaries based on those of similar companies wouldn’t be good for BuzzFeed “because the [compensation] for writers and reporters are much less favorable than [compensation] for startup companies and tech companies.”
Just last month, New York magazine staff writer Jonathan Chait posted on Facebook that unions were “beneficial for most, but not all, workers.” The union drive at New York was risky, he said, and its union lacked a “sensible strategy.”
“I think there are ways to push for higher salaries for lower-earning workers at New York, and I support this even at the cost of more established staffers like myself,” he wrote. “I don’t believe the union would accomplish this better than a simple demand focused on this priority would.”
The median starting salary for reporters is $34,150, and newspapers slashed the number of reporter and correspondent positions in half since 2005, making these modestly-paying jobs highly competitive.
In choosing journalism as a career, reporters trade stability and comfortable salaries for jobs that mean something. They might not have much upward potential, but they’re better than a regular desk job. They might be stressful, but they aren’t boring.
You won’t find the reason for this cognitive dissonance far from what drives journalists to the industry in the first place – a fierce loyalty to reporting the news.
That loyalty to the craft can be shifted in the hands of media companies to result in weaker deals for workers. For example, Gawker’s contract allowed staff to work at will, which gives employers the right to fire workers for any reason at any point in their employment.
“Gawker’s employees didn’t push for that provision because they viewed journalism as a field in which there were often creative differences between editors and writers,” Greenhouse wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review last year. “Many felt that editors should be able to fire people if there were serious creative differences between them, so long as the contract provided good severance.”
Considering corporate journalism’s history of limiting its own workers’ union activity, how fairly do American journalists cover labor? The answer is undoubtedly complicated, but what’s clear is the industry’s willingness to devote resources to the topic has waned with organized labor itself.
Given low union membership in the United States, news organizations tend to not focus labor beats on the minutiae of organized labor negotiations, if they have a labor beat in the first place. At daily newspapers, it’s more likely that labor stories are buried in other beats, whether it’s an education reporter covering last year’s teacher strike in Oklahoma or a business reporter filing annual stories on the country’s widening income gap. Reporters across the spectrum keep up with their own beat while passing the baton of labor coverage back and forth, leaving stories buried or unaddressed in the daily record. After all, what are #metoo stories if not labor stories that were neglected for decades?
In a column for Al Jazeera two years ago, consultant Amy B. Dean suggested that labor unions set the groundwork for Medicaid, Medicare, the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
“They were able to do so, in part, because of a journalistic culture that considered the demands of working people reasonable and worth listening to — as a legitimate part of the public conversation,” she wrote. “As part of the broader mobilization of civil society, journalism helped ensure that these demands would not be dismissed as naïve or merely self-interested.”
As national newspapers moved resources away from labor coverage in recent years, longtime labor reporter Greenhouse’s 2014 buyout from The New York Times became a symbol for the era. During a round of interviews he did after leaving the Times, Greenhouse said one of the reasons the labor movement diminished was because unions didn’t recruit enough new members or do enough to articulate the advantages of organizing.
“Unions allowed themselves to be seen in the negative,” he said.
Asked if that’s the case, NewsGuild’s Lunzer said: “Greenhouse is right. There have been a lot of mistakes made over the years, and clearly the organizing message had fallen on deaf ears for a while. We’re making up for lost time.”
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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