Big deal: Teamsters and GCIU join hands

By: Mark Fitzgerald Back in their 1920s heyday, the Wobblies preached "One Big Union." Now that the Graphic Communications International Union (GCIU) has finally picked a merger partner, the newspaper industry is almost there.

Labor law expert Charles T. Price, a former publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, says the pressmen's decision to become part of a bigger union is virtually the final step in a consolidation that has gathered in the many separate unions that once represented newspaper workers from Linotype operators to copy editors. "You basically now have the Teamsters and the CWA, with a handful of unions such as the electricians, machinists or boilermakers. But those are all extremely small units," says Price, an attorney with the Chicago firm Bell, Boyd & Lloyd LLC.

The GCIU was wooed hard by both the Teamsters, who historically represented circulation drivers, and the Communications Workers of America, which over the years has subsumed The Newspaper Guild and the International Typographers Union (ITU).

In the end, the GCIU board chose to go with the 1.1 million-member Teamsters union, citing its size as a decisive factor. The 70,000-member GCIU, the largest union in the printing industry, needs the shelter of a bigger union as its ranks and resources have shrunk ?mostly because of consolidation and closings among commercial printers. The agreement faces a ratification vote by members later this summer.

What impact will the new pressmen/ Teamsters combination have in newspapers? At least one management-side labor lawyer believes the Teamsters may energize the GCIU's traditionally low-key organizing efforts. L. Michael Zinser, principal in the Zinser Law Firm of Nashville, Tenn., says at many of his newspaper clients, the GCIU is the only union on the premises and has not shown much appetite to expand. "The Teamsters on the other hand are the more active in organizing, so it would be natural for there to be at least some attempts to organize other groups at newspapers where they already have the GCIU. Now, whether they'd be successful is another thing," Zinser says.

There are signs that the GCIU is already stepping up its organizing efforts. It won representation elections at two Cox Newspapers properties, organizing about 100 maintenance and packaging center workers at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and 150 packaging workers at the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News.