Coal Country News Unions Fight For Life by Robert Friedman A green Dodge van with silvered windows, its engine running, is parked in an alleyway next to the four-story building that houses the Wilkes-Barre Times-Leader. A tenfoot, chain-link fence topped with barbed wire separates the driveway from an adjacent parking lot. Two television cameras mounted on one comer of the building noiselessly swivel in 180-degree arcs. Uniformed guards patrol the roof and cluster in the driveway as a dozen men and women file out of the building and disappear into the van. The driver of the unmarked vehicle locks his door and slowly heads toward the back gate. Suddenly he accelerates. Three men with cardboard “ On Strike’’ signs jump out of the way. The van makes a sharp right turn, wheels screeching, and is gone. Employees of the Times-Leader do not normally leave work this way. A few months ago, there were no fences, no television cameras, no uniformed guards, no vans with silvered windows—and no picket signs. But since the paper was bought last May by an out-of-town media conglomerate, Capital Cities Communications, this northeastern Pennsylvania city has become a battleground in a labor war. Not since Hurricane Agnes swept through Wilkes-Barre in 1972, turning Main Street into a torrential river, has the newspaper business here suffered so much. Then, a basement full of soggy newsprint heaved through the ground floor of the Times-Leader building, causing $750,000 in damages. Today, a bitter strike has not only resulted in physical damage—broken windows, vandalized trucks, and injured pickets—but threatens to sink the paper altogether. Like Hurricane Agnes, the newspaper storm raging in Wilkes-Barre had its origins elsewhere. Two fronts — in this case, a New York based newspaper chain determined to break what is saw as a stranglehold by unions and a national union determined to prevent further erosion of its power—happened to collide in Wilkes-Barre. But the same winds prevail across the entire country: newspaper owners are becoming more forceful at the bargaining table, and unions are finding it increasingly difficult to withstand the onslaught. Where once unions did the demanding and publishers the acquiescing, now givebacks, manning reductions, and job buyouts are on every owner’s agenda. Capital Cities made its intentions knows shortly after taking possession of the Times Leader. Contracts with all four unions—the Newspaper Guild, Printing Pressmen, Stereotypers and Electrotypers, and Typographical Union—were due to expire at the end of September, and the company said it wanted concessions on everything from sick-leave benefits to overtime pay to job-security guarantees. There was also talk of buying out some forty production jobs for two million dollars. As Richard Connor, chief operating officer of the Times-Leader, puts it: “We didn’t negotiate the old contract, and we’re not going to live by it. If you buy a house and you don’t like the wallpaper, you change the wallpaper.’’ The unions, of course, did not consider their contracts old wallpaper to be changed according to a new owner’s preference for another pattern. This was their house, too, and each clause was a fixture they had purchased at considerable expense.' As employees watched the fence going up over the summer and learned that Capital Cities had forced a strike last year at another newspaper it owns, they grew apprehensize. “ Morale plummeted,” says Paul Golias, a reporter at the TimesLeader for thirteen years and now secretary of the Council of Newspaper Unions, formed by the four striking locals. “ Working conditions became unbearable as it became clear that Capital Cities was heading for a confrontation. ’’ By mid-September, a strike seemed inevitable. Negotiations were stalled: the unions said they wouldn’t settle for anything less than a renewal of the existing contracts and a 7 percent raise; the company said it had money to spend on raises but wouldn’t retreat on its demands to ease work rules and benefits. Union leaders, believing Capital Cities was out to destroy them, began preparing for a strike. Representatives from the international unions arrived in Wilkes-Barre, latenight meetings were held in local bars, and plans were made to publish a daily strike paper. Company officials, believing that the unions wouldn’t accept their terms, moved inexorably toward a showdown. Employees from other Capital Cities papers were brought to Wilkes -Barre to familiarize them with operations at the Times-Leader, and dozens of Wackenhut security guards were stationed throughout the building, reportedly following union members, in some instances, into bathrooms. Two days before the contracts expired, union members voted by secret ballot to authorize a strike if a settlement could not be reached. The The vote was 185-5. “ We told the rank and file it was probably going to be a lengthy strike,” recalls James Occutt, international representative of the Newspaper Guild. “ Maybe as long as a year.” On Friday, October 6 after the collapse of negotiations the previous evening, 205 TimesLeader employees (out of 225) left their typewriters, cameras, and presses, and took up picket sings outside the building. Within minutes, the ground-floor windows and front door were plastered with yellow stickers saying “ Cap Cities Go Home.” The strike which shut down the 70,000 circulation Times-Leader for five days, erupted into frequent violence, and, after six weeks, was' no closer to settlement than when it began—marks a bitter transition in Wilkes-Barre between two eras of the newspaper business. When the city’s three, competing, daily newspapers merged in 1939 after a 175-day strike, the families that owned them were joining a trend toward monopolization in the industry that would soon make all but a handful of American cities one-ownership towns. (In 1920, some 700 cities in the United Stated had competing papers; today fewer than fifty are left with competing dailies.) Monopoly was, among other things, a cushion against trade unionism, protecting the owners’ assets, while allowing them to absorb the financial impact of their employees’ demands. The company never made enough money to buy air conditioning for the newsroom or to pay the overtime 18
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