By the next day, the New York Daily News was well on its way to being a nonunion newspaper. Its owner, the Chicago-based Tribune Co., had achieved its apparent aim. Nine of 10 unions, including the one representing reporters, went on strike, nearly 2,500 workers in all. With no contract since March, their protections seemed gone. Every union employee refusing to cross the picket line and report to work was fired (though some could be hired back). Their permanent replacements, including a handful of subs waiting to fly in from the Chicago Tribune and the Orlando Sentinel, had been trained for months to perform union jobs. Labor, facing total defeat, believes this is merely a prelude to killing the paper; management, itching to bust the unions, believes it is the only way to keep the 71-year-old tabloid alive.
Beyond the specifics, the troubles at the Daily News typify the collision of cultures afflicting so many American industries. On one side are well-paid yet resentful blue-collar workers, trying desperately to hang on to illogical work rules (e.g., half-empty delivery trucks) and absurd staffing levels they won during good times. On the other side are manicured, steely corporate executives facing unacceptably high financial losses yet neglectful of the human consequences of their actions. In the middle are the journalists-trapped between tribal values and the ink in their veins. Badly torn, most Newspaper Guild reporters and photographers last week sided with the back shop.
In the seven months since the contract expired amid acrimony about the good faith of both sides, the unions tried mightily to avoid a strike. They knew how prepared management was. Sure enough, employees found that their computer log-one had been changed overnight. Back-shop replacements from Chicago had for months been equipped with long-distance beepers to speed their deployment. The folly of striking was underscored last week by still unsubstantiated labor claims that management had provoked the Brooklyn incident. More to the point, the unions had simply been outfoxed.
Suicidal hubris: The strike raises the philosophical question of what a newspaper really is. “We are the Daily News,” says reporter Jerry Capeci, surveying a 42nd Street bar full of stunned co-workers, mostly now unemployed. “Without us, there is no paper.” That’s a touchingly suicidal hubris: the Daily News is indeed being published without them, with a great many copies delivered. Now labor wants a boycott to test New York’s reputation as a union town. That would claim yet another set of victims: readers.
With declining readership and a recession already underway, New York City doesn’t seem big enough for its three tabloids to continue unchanged. In September it looked as if the hemorrhaging New York Post would die, but severe staffing and salary cuts stayed the execution. New York Newsday loses millions, but remains small and subsidized by its Long Island parent. Over the last decade the Daily News has dropped nearly half of its daily circulation (before the strike it was down to a still-huge 1.2 million, trailing only the Los Angeles Times) and lost $115 million. This year alone, losses are expected to exceed $60 million; by one estimate, as much as 40 percent of that was spent on preparing to break the unions. To survive long term, the paper needs roughly $500 million in new equipment, an amount the Tribune Co. says it can afford.
At the moment, the key issue is the Tribune Co.’s larger motive. Free to restructure the work force, will it keep the paper afloat as promised? Or did the company simply fire all of those workers in order to sell or shut the News without having to spend $160 million in severance and unfunded pensions? “The risk of losing [that money] through litigation is less than the risk of keeping the paper alive,” says labor lawyer Theodore Kheel, an unpaid adviser to the unions who believes Chicago management has written off New York. Publisher James Hoge has always vowed that his only goal is to save the News. But if the company wants to prove that, why not pledge to pay the $150 million if the new, nonunion paper ends up being closed? That would put some weight behind its high-minded promises to stay open. When a company busts a union, it must also bust the new clouds of ill feeling. So far, the Daily News hasn’t.
