Labor Union Invades Law Firm
“I was having dinner with a friend of mine shortly after getting a job at Mayer Brown & Platt,” explains Zarkadas, who started there as a proofreader 14 months ago. “I started at 15 thousand a year, which breaks down to $8.24 an hour. He mentioned to me that he’d met some people at a party who were proofreaders and made $17 an hour. My original thought was that they were working for some medical or very technical publishing firm.
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Huge in dignity and influence–the new mayor’s brother William Daley practices there, and so does Adlai Stevenson–Mayer Brown & Platt fields about 350 lawyers in its Chicago office, and there are other offices in New York, Washington, Denver, Houston, LA, London, and Tokyo. Justice, of course, is the holy grail of the legal profession. But the actual product, by Mayer Brown’s own account, is paper. Think of LaSalle Street as a white-collar mill district, grinding it out.
The CTU actually does represent some proofreaders, although not at law firms. Augie Sallas asked her to come in. He told her he could put her on a waiting list for a union job, but he had a better idea. How would she like to organize the proofers at Mayer Brown & Platt?
Last week, rival contingents from the CTU and the law firm marched into a National Labor Relations Board hearing room. CTU attorney Gilbert Cornfield came to argue that the 31 proofers constitute a legitimate bargaining unit, and Mayer Brown was just as ready to insist they don’t. Unveiling their flow charts, the firm’s legal team explained the manufacturing process to the NLRB hearing office. Lawyers create the paper, secretaries type it, word processors print it, proofreaders check it, and the mail room ships it out the door. It’s a seamless process.
ESOP Fables: Who’s Distressing the Gary Post-Tribune?
The employees’ organization NWI/ESOP Publishing Inc. talked the Indiana Department of Commerce and the Lake County Economic Development Commission out of $25,000 each, and the Lake County Development Authority out of $10,000. These allocations did not sit well with the Hammond Times to the west, which has run a series of skeptical articles, such as the one that appeared April 2 under the headline “Analysts say ESOP proposal is risky deal.”
