APRIL 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBER 4

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L A B O R

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"WE CALL IT FEATHERBEDDING," says Susie Ellwood, vice president of the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA). "The union contract required they have more people than necessary to get the job done."

The DNA runs the joint business operations of the two Detroit dailies where a bitter strike is now entering its tenth month. The Detroit News belongs to Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper chain, and the Detroit Free Press belongs to Knight-Ridder, the second largest. These two media giants are out to cut costs drastically and, in the process, set an example for the other newspapers in their respective empires.

Striker John Peralta, vice president of the Mailers union, one of the six local newspaper unions on strike, counters, "Too many companies are destroying the good job and turning it into a part-time job. Our struggle is to preserve jobs for the future."

This profound difference in perspective is driving the strike, with each side, corporation and union, convinced it is fighting for the shape of the future. This same conflict is being played out in workplaces across the country -- and across the world -- as companies adjust to increasing global competition and to new technologies. Workers say that this adjustment is robbing them of job security, working conditions and pay they had come to count on, and, equally important, of good jobs for the next generation. "I've got to leave more to my kids, something more meaningful than a part-time job," says Gary Rusnell, vice chairperson of Typographical Union Local 18.

Newspaper executives say modern competition forces them to abolish outdated work practices, pointing to the electronic media that compete for advertiser dollars. "Things change, things are always evolving," says Tim Kelleher, chief negotiator for the newspapers. "In the nearly 100 years of this century we've seen more change than in the previous 1,900. We are more and more technologically advanced. Today, you can lay out a paper on a Macintosh."

The restructured workplace system companies are demanding is often called "lean production;" another buzzword is "reengineering." Fortune magazine writes, "Reengineers start from the future and work backwards, as if unconstrained by existing methods, people, or departments ... with a meat ax and sandpaper, they conform the company to their vision." The Wall Street Journal predicts the "reengineering movement" will erase 25 million U.S. jobs (private sector jobs number 90 million).

Paring workers

Lean production was pioneered by Toyota in Japan; it touched down in the United States in California in 1985 in an auto assembly plant called NUMMI, jointly owned by Toyota and General Motors. Because it achieved record gains in both productivity and quality, NUMMI became a mecca for managers from all industries. They found a "lean" system that ran with as few resources as possible, human and material. Extensive contracting out, use of temporaries, idle time cut to the bone through time and motion studies (often performed by workers themselves), workers required to know many jobs and flexibility in hours worked -- these features keep the core workforce in a lean facility relatively small, shifting as much work as possible to suppliers and contractors.

In the 1990s, "flexible" and "lean" have become the goals of managers everywhere, from hospitals who convert their staffs to "generic health care workers" to the companies who have made temporary help agencies like Manpower, Inc. the fastest-growing type of employer in the economy.

"I can't think of an employer that isn't trying to cut permanent jobs and replace them with part-time jobs," says Steve Babson, a labor program specialist at Wayne State University in Detroit and editor of Lean Work: Exploitation and Empowerment in the Global Auto Industry, published last year. "The issues cut across so many industrial and occupational boundaries."

"The newspaper strike includes both white collar and blue collar, people who use computers as well as people who drive trucks. What unifies them is a management approach that combines rapid introduction of new technologies with the accompanying demand to cut permanent jobs, replace full-time work with part-time labor and introduce unlimited contracting out," Babson explains.

"Flexibility -- that was one of their key words," says striker Rusnell. The companies' goals, according to Kelleher, include: cutting crew sizes in the press room; hiring more part-time mailers at half the hourly wage of full-timers; shifting work from union to non-union workers within the company; giving managers flexibility to hand out merit raises rather than across-the-board increases; and exempting certain workers from time-and-a-half pay for overtime.

"We don't necessarily want to operate union-free," says Kelleher, "but we will never return to the days of restrictive work practices."

Ruling the workplace

The unions say their work rules are necessary for safety, for decent working conditions or to keep managers from exploiting workers. Lou Mleczko, president of the reporters' union, the Newspaper Guild, says management at the Detroit News wants his members to volunteer to be salaried -- exempt from overtime pay. "This would be an incentive to call those `volunteers' in on their days off," says Mleczko. "You could get roped into all sorts of extra duty. It would be like being on call 24 hours a day."

Asked why anyone would volunteer, Jetta Fraser, a striking News photographer, says, "It comes back to the merit pay" -- the papers' other demand in the newsrooms. With raises largely under the control of editors, "a lot of people would be pressured to so-called volunteer," Mleczko believes.

Here the newspapers are taking their cue from the lean Japanese factories, where up to half of a worker's pay can be determined by managers' evaluations. Small wonder, says Ben Watanabe, formerly a visiting instructor at Wayne State University, that Japanese workers work through breaks and sing the company anthem.

For its blue-collar workers, the DNA simply wants to get the work done with fewer people. One initial demand was to reduce crews on the printing presses from nine to seven -- and the pressmen's union agreed. But, Kelleher says, replacement workers are now operating the presses with crews of five or six -- and the earlier deal is no longer on the table.

Union members dispute Kelleher's figures (on the picket line, he is commonly called "Kelle-liar"), pointing out that press runs are way down during the strike. "They've thrown at us many, many times that other newspapers with the same equipment use far less manning," says pressman Pete Shelest. "But if you look at [most of] Gannett's papers, they're all rinky-dink, mom and pop operations. Their total run might be 100,000 papers. I run that on my press before lunch."

In any case, pressmen point to the jobs they've already given up -- 60 out of 295 at the last contract in 1992 -- and they defend their staffing practices. Shelest says pressmen must be ready for lightning changes: "It's like the Indianapolis pit crew. When the cars are going around in circles, everybody's happy. When they come in the pit -- that's what they pay us for, when the oatmeal hits the fan. They [management] run around saying, `Hey, this thing has got a date on it.'

"So, yeah, when everything's going okay, we sit there and basically twiddle our thumbs. We check the ink density; I run the electrical control panel. But when the sheet goes down and something happens, and we have to change plates, that's when you need your skilled crew.

"You see, the paper we start a run with is not ever the same as the paper we finish the run with. News happens 24 hours a day. The sports page, the stock market -- they're constantly keeping it updated."

The Typographical Union is on strike even though all its members have lifetime job security, negotiated years ago when technological change cut their numbers radically. These are the "printers" who 25 years ago set "hot type" -- slugs of lead, Ben Franklin-style -- then learned how to operate electronic linotypes, later moved to composing ads and "cold paste-up" of computer-generated film, and, at the time of the strike, were ready to move to "pagination" -- composing entire pages, ads and all, on Macintoshes. Most of the typesetting they used to do is now handled by the reporters themselves, as computers made it possible to skip the retyping of stories. "Twenty years ago we had 2,000 printers," says Gary Rusnell. "We had close to 300 six years ago; now we're down to 110."

The union is trying to preserve its numbers as management switches work to non-union employees and part-timers. Part-time printers start at $8 an hour, half the pay of full-timers. Non-union salespeople now compose ads on laptops. And a few years ago, the DNA set up a second, state-of-the-art composing room staffed by non-union workers.

News to workers: "surrender unconditionally"

Despite Kelleher's protestations, the unions are convinced that the companies' goal is to oust them completely. "`We don't want unions' -- that's what `flexibility' means," says Al Derey, president of Teamsters Local 372. "They want a union-free atmosphere where they can change things at a whim. They say they do not want to be controlled by any `outside source.' That shows you what they consider the union, an outside source."

The unions' fears are given credence by News publisher Robert Giles' widely quoted threat: "We're going to hire a whole new workforce and go on without unions, or they can surrender unconditionally and salvage what they can." On October 5, 1995, the unions did offer to return to work without a contract -- and to make $15 million worth of staff cuts and work rule changes. Some members considered this a surrender, pure and simple. But Kelleher turned the unions down flat -- indicating that Giles' first alternative is the operative one.

Managers at the DNA and elsewhere say the changes they want are inevitable, results of competition and technology. Bob Herbert, an op-ed columnist for the New York Times, sums up this view: "The smart set, obsessed by the impact of technology and the global economy, would have you believe there is not much that can be done to counter the humiliation of American workers. That mystical force called the market has spoken. The message is: Bill Gates has an operating system that is more efficient than you, and Bangladesh has workers that are far cheaper than you."

Many government officials seem to agree. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich praises what he calls the "high-value enterprise," and notes, "Relatively few people actually work for the high-value enterprise in the traditional sense of having steady jobs with fixed salaries." President Clinton told a Detroit audience on a 1993 visit that they should expect to hold eight different jobs in their lifetimes.

The problem that results when every firm jumps on the leanness treadmill is that no one is taking care of the casualties. Even the Wall Street Journal, which favors the trend, asks, "Reengineering can be great for the performance of individual companies, but what about the economy as a whole?" Asked what happens to workers whose skills are made obsolete, Kelleher mentions "retraining, moving to other areas of the company ... With the JOA [the 1989 Joint Operating Agreement that cost the unions 600 jobs], some were waiting for the opportunity to go out and do something else, start a little store ..."

For managers like Kelleher, their responsibility, by definition, is to the shareholders; they must assume that the marketplace, or families, or government will absorb the consequences of their decisions. Of course, these days government has renounced that particular burden.

By and large, companies are becoming lean without much organized resistance from employees, even in unionized companies. The leadership of the United Auto Workers, for example, decided early on to cooperate with the automakers' plans to downsize and to get more work out of those workers who remain. The total Big Three blue-collar workforce is now a third smaller than in 1978. One result: the rate of workplace injuries in 1992 was five times that in 1980.

Whatever the odds, the Detroit newspaper workers decided to resist the trend -- and touched a chord with the hundreds, sometimes thousands, of workers from other unions who have come out to their picket lines, many of them auto workers. "People realize it could be them," says Mike Dicker, a rank and file pressman. "It happened to be us. We didn't want to be the vanguard."

Alex Wassell, a skilled tradesman at Chrysler's Dodge Truck factory, has sold candy in his plant to raise money for the strikers. On the newspaper workers' picket line, he says, "It affects everybody. We've been having a lot of setbacks in the labor movement, and it's finally sinking in that people've got to fight to maintain their lifestyles, their jobs, their union affiliation. If we don't do it here and if we don't do it now, it doesn't look good."

Union-Busting in the Detroit News

At stake in the Detroit newspapers strike is whether Detroit will continue to function as a two-paper town, and whether unions can win -- or survive -- a bitter strike in U.S. organized labor's stronghold city. The aggressive anti-unionism of the Gannett and Knight-Ridder newspaper chains has been met by militant workers with widespread community support, producing a highly charged confrontation that has now lasted for nine months. Here is how the conflict has unfolded: 1989: Detroit's two dailies adopt a Joint Operating Agreement to combine business operations and weekend editions. The newspaper unions vigorously oppose the agreement, which strengthens management's hand. In the past, a strike against one paper benefitted the other, but now there is one company with one game plan. Hundreds of jobs are cut as the papers combine operations. 1992: Unions accept three-year wage freeze and more job cuts. 1994: Papers make $56 million in profits for the year. July 13, 1995: 2,500 members of six locals strike over company demands for more concessions. July 27: A labor/community/religious coalition forms to support the strikers. Throughout the strike, the coalition holds many events, such as fundraisers and picketing homes of newspaper executives. August 10: The Free Press says the replacements it has hired are permanent. August 26: News Publisher Robert Giles says papers will go non-union unless unions "unconditionally surrender." August 31: The National Labor Relations Board rules the strike an unfair labor practice strike, saying the Detroit Newspaper Agency (DNA) refused to bargain in good faith. If upheld on appeal, this would require the company to rehire the strikers at the strike's end, rather than displace them with permanent replacements. September 2: An AFL-CIO rally attended by thousands of supporters spontaneously turns into an all-night blockade of the papers' printing plant, to prevent company trucks from distributing the lucrative joint Sunday newspaper. September 9: A second all-night blockade is disrupted by trucks' surprise ramming of picket lines. Helicopters airlift papers out of the plant. September 13: An injunction barring mass picketing of printing plant is issued. Union leaders say they will obey. September: DNA refuses to allow a regular circulation audit. October: Strikers claim circulation of the two papers is 520,000 combined. Piles of dumped papers are found in landfills. DNA claims circulation figures of 750,000 and 1 million on Sundays. Companies slash advertising prices as much as 70 percent. Knight-Ridder's third-quarter profit is down 82 percent; Gannett's 9 percent. At the bargaining table, negotiators admit home delivery in the immediate six-county area is 383,000 -- a 31 percent drop. Fall: The unions organize a boycott of stores advertising in struck papers. Fall: The unions hold late-night Saturday pickets of several hundred people at various distribution centers. There are occasional attacks on scab vehicles and police or Vance Guard violence against picketers. The pickets' effect on distribution is limited. Fall: Many fund-raising events and rallies sponsored by other unions continue to draw large numbers of supporters. October 5: The unions offer to return to work and accept binding arbitration. The unions would identify $15 million in savings through changes in work rules and staffing levels that could be written into new contracts. DNA refuses. It says previous concession demands are no longer on the table, asserting the papers have made much deeper cuts and intend them to be permanent. The DNA says only a small number of jobs remain to be filled. October 27: A Unity Victory Caucus is formed. Members of the six striking unions press their leaders to resume mass picketing at the printing plant and to produce a competing newspaper. November 19: The first edition of the strikers' weekly paper, Detroit Sunday Journal, is published, bankrolled by international unions and the AFL-CIO. December: Retail ads for the two papers are down 30 percent. (The Thanksgiving-Christmas season is ordinarily the most lucrative for newspapers.) December: Knight-Ridder says strike losses could total $75 million after taxes through 1996. December 22: Detroit Mayor Dennis Archer and Catholic Archbishop Maida bring the two sides together; the companies refuse to negotiate. January 12: After an NLRB investigation finds that picketers at newspaper offices (not the printing plant) are yelling at scabs and flattening tires, the unions sign an informal agreement not to illegally interfere with papers and their employees. February 8: The NLRB tosses out the agreement, saying the unions were not following it. The NLRB brings unfair labor practice charges against unions, but (as of the end of March) does not act on employers' request to seek injunction against unions. February: An independent survey reveals readership of the struck dailies is down 30 percent from pre-strike levels. March 6: Community support group "Readers United" begins a civil disobedience campaign, blocking doors of the Detroit News. Bishops and the City Council president are arrested, along with others. By March 28, weekly arrests total 154. Seven a.m. rallies are attended by hundreds of strikers and supporters. -- J.S.