The Tribune’s War on Unions
In July 1985 nearly 800 typographers, pressmen, and mailers went on strike against the Tribune over issues that focused on lifetime job guarantees and traditional working conditions. The Tribune soon began hiring permanent replacements, and most of the strikers never worked another day at the paper.
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On a cold and rainy day in 1986 the hapless unionists rallied in front of the Tribune Tower to mark the 100th anniversary of the Haymarket riot. Georgia Lloyd came and spoke. “As a stockholder,” she recalls, “I felt rather responsible and guilty.” Afterward, Frank Nessinger, a striking pressman, invited Lloyd to lunch. “I think she rather enjoyed it,” he says. “She doesn’t get out much anymore.”
They have nearly but not quite succeeded. In fact, this past October Nessinger was actually called back to work. Five years after walking out, he returned to Freedom Center, the Tribune’s huge riverside printing plant. He returned to the same equipment and to the same union salary, but to a sea of unfamiliar faces–all those nonunion replacements who marched in years ago and are now paid thousands of dollars less than he is.
But the Daily News strike has gone differently. In New York ten unions walked out, among them the drivers (in Chicago, the Teamsters made a separate peace) and the editorial staff (the Tribune’s isn’t organized). The result has been a far more violent strike than Chicago knew, a daily paper that’s a shadow of its old self, and massive distribution problems. The Daily News has lost harrowing amounts of circulation and advertising.
Former Daily News editor James Wieghart, writing in the New York Times: “The public should keep in mind that these costly and outmoded work practices [that the Daily News management wants to eliminate] were negotiated into contracts agreed to by management since the 1960’s. It is unreasonable to expect the unions to give them up in one sitting, particularly to a management that cannot be trusted. . . . Readers and advertisers should see this strike for what it is: a premeditated effort to break the unions . . .”
The three unions did, however, call off their strikes in early ’86. The judge also found that the company then tried to conceal manpower shortages inside its pressroom in order to avoid having to recall union pressmen who wanted to go back to work. The judge derided testimony he’d heard from the man who’d been the Tribune’s pressroom manager at the time; he called the testimony “an obvious fabrication.”
