I’m called by somebody from the local of the Newspaper Guild–one of the unions on strike against New York’s Daily News–about a demonstration in front of the Tribune Tower the next morning. The Tribune Company owns seven newspapers, including the 71-year-old Daily News, and the company’s board of directors is to meet Tuesday morning to hear a report from embattled Daily News publisher James Hoge. Some strikers from New York are coming to try to confront Charles Brumback, the Tribune Company’s president, and they’ve called for a rally and picket. As a representative of the National Writers Union, a small and struggling union of free-lance writers, I, along with politicians and representatives of other unions, am asked to say some words of support.
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I’ve been following the strike, which has been racking New York for the past month and a half and has seized the attention of people around the country who are concerned with the state of unions, labor-management relations, or newspapers. It’s been a savagely fought battle on both sides, with charges and countercharges of intimidation and coercion. What does seem clear is that management deliberately provoked the strike, then moved in immediately with replacement workers and security forces they’d had waiting in the wings–all to rid themselves of printing trade unions, just as the Tribune did here after the 1985 strike of its pressmen, printers, and mailers. Yet despite the fact that the Daily News apparently spent some $75 million on preparations for the strike and had new workers on the job within an hour, the Tribune Company may actually lose this strike. The New York strikers, from nine of the paper’s ten unions, have been able to rally public support and have cut circulation by better than half (from more than a million to about 500,000), and the paper has lost almost all of its major advertisers.
Rivera is addressing a not-too-large (150 to 200), slowly revolving crowd of pickets. Most of the signs are generic ones from the guild and simply announce that the unions are on strike in New York against the News. But here and there is one that’s hand lettered: “The News is Bad–So is the Tribune”; “Daily News Locked Out–Owned by Union-Busting Tribune.” Many of the marchers look like run-of-the-mill worker types; others are more smartly dressed. Some 15 unions, covering trades from plumbers to teachers, are said to be represented, and there are three Daily News reporters. There’s also a bunch of older weather-beaten guys, who are either from the Tribune Unity Committee (the strikers who continue the campaign against the Trib–and who also made the handlettered signs) or some of what a friend describes as the old unionists you always see at union rallies. One of these– Norm Roth, a retired autoworker–has brought his harmonica. He plays some of the old songs, mostly “Solidarity Forever” and “Hold the Fort.” Some join in, singing as they walk around, “When the union’s inspiration through the workers’ blood shall run.É Hold the fort, for we are coming. Union men be stro-o-o-ong.” I see a couple others from the Writers Union. We stand and watch for a while, then join the marchers.
Rivera turns away from the blocked door. The press packs its gear. Clumps of people exchange impressions and good-byes. Then Tribune security watches from inside the door as individuals and small groups drift off across the street or up the sidewalk.
