Coal Countrycont a strike last December. After eighteen months of fruitless negotiations, involving many of the same issues at stake in Wilkes-Barre, the company unilaterally announced that the old contract was no longer in effect and posted new work rules. Some forty Guild members and pressmen walked off the job. They have not yet returned. The Michigan paper has continued to publish, at first recruiting employees from other Capital Cities papers and eventually hiring permanent replacements. Two other craft unions refused to support the strike, and a boycott of the paper proved ineffective. Today, there is no Guild or pressmen’s union in Pontiac, and, unless a complaint recently filed against the company by the National Labor Relations Board is upheld in the courts — a process that may take years — it is likely to remain that way. Perhaps encouraged by its success in Michigan, Capital Cities decided to assert its “management rights” in Wilkes-Barre — even if it meant a showdown with the unions. As company president Burke says, “There’s no doubt a strike harms the franchise, but accepting the conditions that prevailed in WilkesBarre would have harmed it even more.” Capital Cities may have figured wrong. Wilkes-Barre, with a history of union militance running through it like a vein of anthracite, was different from suburban Detroit. The city literally was built on coal. Though today there are fewer than 5,000 mining jobs left in surrounding Luzerne County, memories of the days when 67,000 men worked in the anthracite fields are still strong. By bringing more than half a billion dollars in black-lung benefits for disabled miners into the district, Daniel Flood has assured himself a Congressional seat in perpetuity. (He is also Wilkes-Barre’s major source of jobs, having sing lehandedly replaced the declining coal industry with pork-barrel projects.) The children and grandchildren of coal miners — many of whom worked at the Times-Leader — were brought up on stories about the Molly Maguires hanged at nearby Mauch Chunk one hundred years ago; about the massacre of fifty miners at Lattimer in 1897; about the bloody battles with a private army hired by the mine operators, known as the Coal and Iron Police. Then, as now, the issue was the pursuit of profit masquerading as “management rights.” One account, written in 1877 by a coal-company attorney, sounds strikingly familiar: “ Encroachment after encroachment was made upon the rights of the employer, until it came to be claimed that no man should be employed and no man discharged except as sanctioned by the ‘Union.’ ” One of the oldest newsroom locals in the country, a chapter of the International Typographical Union, was founded in Wilkes-Barre in the late 1800s. The Newspaper Guild got an early foothold here when United Mine Workers president John L. Lewis threw his union’s support behind a strike by newspaper employees seeking Guild representation in 1937. (According to Joe Collis, president of the Guild local in Wilkes-Barre at the time, Lewis personally sat in on the negotiations with the newspaper owners.) Since then, there have been three Guild strikes — the 175-day walkout in 1939, a 180-day shutdown in 1954, and a shorter strike in 1974 — each resulting in significant gains for the union. After a humiliating defeat in Pontiac, the national Guild was prepared to do battle with Capital Cities in Wilkes-Barre. Holding the line — every line in the contract — became a matter of principle and survival for the union. One company proposal, for example, would have allowed management to dismiss or discipline employees for incompetence and denied the union the right to submit such cases to arbitration. “ If I accepted that provision,” says Guild representative Orcutt, “ I would have to tell my members to quit. Why should they pay dues to a union which can’t afford them protection?” To have weakened any of the benefits or work rules won over the past forty years in Wilkes-Barre would have been an embarrassing setback for the national Guild, which has been in disarray in recent years, and today represents only an estimated 20 percent of its potential membership. By all accounts, Capital Cities was taken by surprise when the unions struck on October 6 — not by the walkout itself, but by the strikers’ militance, their solidarity, and the support they engendered in the community. “ We were knocked off our feet,” says Richard Connor. “There’s no question about that.” Guild representative Orcutt agrees. “When Capital Cities bought the p ap e r ,” he says, “ they were probably told that the unions here were apathetic, that they were at each other’s throats, and that the public believed unions were getting too strong. To some extent, that determination was accurate. What they didn’t count on was that their barbed wire and helmeted guards would — like the attack on Pearl Harbor —awaken a sleeping tiger. ’’ During the first few days of the strike, as union members tried to shut down the Times-Leader and company officials tried to keep publishing, there were numerous violent incidents. Wackenhut guards sprayed picketers with fire hoses and chemical fire extinguishers; company vehicles struck a number of union members milling at the gates, including two men who said they were hit when a car driven by TimesLeader publisher Bruce McIntyre sped into a picket line (McIntyre, C LO S ED O N L E O N A R D O DA V IN C I S B IR T H D A Y who, like Connor, was brought in from The Oakland Press, was briefly detained by police, but no charges were pressed); windows at the newspaper building were smashed and delivery trucks damaged; and a police officer from a Pittsburgh suburb, moonlighting for the TimesLeader while on vacation from his regular job, allegedly pulled a gun during a scuffle with striking employees (a color photograph of the guard, his face badly bruised in the fight, lies on Connor’s desk, evidence, he says of union brutality). By Monday, October 9, TimesLeader officials decided to suspend publication. “ We were frightened,” Connor recalls. “Our building was being attacked, our trucks were being demolished, and we couldn’t get any police protection.” The paper did not reappear until the company obtained a court order four days later limiting the number of pickets at each entrance. The order also enjoined the company “ from any acts of violence or threats of same.” The same day the Times-Leader disappeared, the Council of Newspaper Unions launched a daily strike paper called the Citizens’ Voice. The first issue, a twenty-four-page tabloid, carried the headline, HUMAN DIGNITY NEEDS SUPPORT. Within days, the paper was claiming a circulation of 50,000 and running advertising from most of the retailers—including Sears and J.C. Penney—who normally buy space in the Times-Leader. (Many advertisers continued to appear exclusively in the Citizens’ Voice, even after the Times-Leader resumed publication, though some, like Sears, advertised in both.) Published from a hastily puttogether office two doors away from the Times-Leader, the Citizens’ Voice was designed to put economic pressure on the company and to arouse public support for the strike. In addition to covering the usual local news, it ran articles about two Wackenhut guards charged with raping a woman in a Wilkes-Barre motel (that incident may have led the company to replace the Wackenhuts in early November with guards from a local security agency) and letters from readers who complained that Capital Cities, as one writer put it, “had crept like a poison into our community.” When the Times-Leader reappeared October 14, Wilkes-Barre was no longer a one-newspaper town. The paper had lost its monopoly on advertising, readers, and carriers. Advertising was way down: the November 7 issue, for example, had only two pages of local advertising, compared with a pre-strike average of twenty, and one page of classifieds instead of the usual five or six. Circulation, 70,000 before the strike, was also off. Company officials placed it in the vicinity of 50,000, but one major advertiser said it was closer to 30,000. One reason the Times-Leader had so much trouble with its circulation was that it depended on some 1,100 boys and girls who home-deliver more than 80 percent of the newspapers in Wilkes-Barre. The carriers play the same critical role that delivery-truck drivers do in large cities. Many of them, either because their supervisors were on strike or because their parents were prounion, refused to carry the TimesLeader and switched to the Citizens’ Voice; some went so far as to throw bundles of the Times-Leader into the Susquehanna River, which runs through the city. “Are we hurting them?” James Orcutt asks rhetorically, pacing around a small room at the Citizens’ Voice offices. The traffic in the corridors is heavy: union members returning from picket duty; reporters rushing about trying to get out the next issue of the strike paper; messengers darting in with stories of carriers being harassed by the Times-Leader. On one wall is a gallery of photographs—“scabs” entering and leaving the TimesLeader building. We’ve heard rumors that Capital Cities has anywhere from $5 million to $20 million to spend on this strike,” Orcutt says. “Well, they’re going to have to spend every penny of it before they’re through.” A few doors up North Main Street, Richard Connor sits in a barren, third-floor office. The building is almost deserted. A poster outside his door says “We’re Doin’ I t ,” as if to remind him that the Times-Leader really is publishing. The footsteps of a security guard on the setback outside his window is another reminder that these are not normal times. Connor has all the earnestness of a municipal reformer bent on rooting out political corruption. He talks about one striking reporter alleged to be a “ghost employee” of a state senator, another who is said to have sole “mentions”’ in the Times-Leader for $50. He has only been in Wilkes-Barre a few weeks, but he speaks as if it were home: “We’re not going to let a bunch of hoodlums and lawbreakers run us out of a place where we can do a goodjob.” In his spacious office on Madison Avenue, Capital Cities president Daniel Burke puts his feet up on his desk and talks about the WilkesBarre strike. “ We just got blown away from a public-relations standpoint,” he says. “ But we’re going to improve that paper—with or without a settlement. Wilkes-Barre is our town, too. We’re part of it now.” He pauses. Then, in an unusually blunt assertion of proprietary rights—even for the president of a newspaper chain—he adds, “One way or another, we’re going to inflict a paper on the community.’’ Reprinted by permission of Robert Friedman and Columbia Journalism Review WE'VE EXPANDED! 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