Union Clout Waning p.

By: George Garneau

Publishers inclined to publish rather than perish during strikes
THEY MAY BARK as loud, but unions are losing their bite at newspapers, according to attorneys for publishers.
From the newsroom to the mailroom, they say, newspaper unions have lost much of their clout, thanks to technology, economic hard times and labor disarray.
"Something is changing in the newspaper industry," Cristina Mendoza, Knight-Ridder Inc. vice president and associate general counsel, said at an early-morning session at the Newspaper Association of America convention in Boston.
Even drivers' unions, most prominently the Teamsters, which were once feared as the only ones able to shut a paper down, are no longer considered unassailable and are increasingly, and successfully, being challenged, Mendoza said.
Because slumping advertising has forced many papers to streamline their distribution systems and cut costs, she said, newspapers increasingly accept that they have to "take on the tough issues and fight for them."
Modernizing distribution usually involves cutting jobs and giving management more control over work rules, issues that set off alarms for labor.
"We've got to face the fact that strikes might be more likely," she said.
Of the most notable strikes in recent years, including those at the Pittsburgh newspapers, the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, only the Pittsburgh Teamsters succeeded in shutting down the papers.
Nowadays, more than ever before, publishers are willing to continue publishing during strikes, their lawyers say.
"You've lost an awful lot of bargaining power to acknowledge that any union can shut you down," said Sandra P. Zemm, a partner in the law firm Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather and Geraldson of Chicago.
Mendoza agreed, saying, "We are concentrating on publishing."
Zemm said the decline of union power has accelerated in the last decade, particularly because technology allows publishers to produce and distribute newspapers with "significantly fewer" people.
Nevertheless, distribution remains a publisher's Achilles heel, or area of "highest vulnerability," in case of a strike, Zemm said.
It could have been a lack of concern about union issues, or maybe it was the 7 a.m. starting time, but fewer than 30 of the 1,300 registered conventioneers attended the session on unions.
While publishers have not yet figured out how to make unions disappear, Mendoza and Zemm painted a sobering, at least for unions, picture of declining labor power in all areas of newspapers, but especially in the newsroom.
The Newspaper Guild's membership has plunged to 27,000, its lowest since 1957, from a peak of 35,000, a decline Zemm attributed to decertifications as well as layoffs.
Consequently, the Guild has suffered a "significant diminution" of power and is in "disarray" as dissident members organize to oppose the international leadership, which for years has failed to accomplish its goal of merging with a larger union.
The New York Daily News, where new owner Mortimer Zuckerman signed contracts with all unions but the Guild, underscores how readily blue-collar craft unions will abandon the white-collar Guild, she said.
As to the Guild's growing preference for boycotts?it is boycotting Zuckerman?as an alternative to strikes, Zemm said, "I've not seen one work."
The Guild is aggressively battling repetitive strain injury, or RSI, the debilitating condition produced by overwork on computers and poorly designed workstations, and has filed 3,500 RSI complaints in 12 months, Zemm said.
Guild jobs in advertising sales are shifting to all-commission pay and independent contractors because "the business is not that easy," Mendoza said.
In the newsroom, publishers increasingly demand merit pay as a means of rewarding achievement and encouraging the best journalists to stay, she said. While the Guild resists the use of stringers, it is trying to extend its jurisdiction into new lines of electronic information services.
In pressrooms and composing rooms, where computerized page makeup and automated press controls have cut staffing needs, publishers have been forced to offer buyouts and have exchanged job security for long-term contracts.
The Graphic Communications International Union, representing press operators, has financial problems and has sold its building in Washington, D.C., Zemm said. In an effort to boost membership, the GCIU is making its members pay up to $1 a month toward an organizing drive among group-owned newspapers.
In the small category of labor cooperation, there were signs of growth.
At a handful of papers, publishers and unions have begun adopting new ideas designed to appeal to the interest both sides have in producing better products so as to stay in business.
Warm and cuddly concepts such as "mutual gains bargaining" and other progressive ideas were reported working or in the planning stage at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Buffalo (N.Y.) News, the Seattle Times and the Dayton, Ohio, Daily News.