Big Awards Weekend
The Patriot-News took a break from its fratricidal war over union decertification to receive a whole bunch of journalism awards this past weekend in State College. I myself won first place awards from the AP Managing Editors and in the Keystone Press Awards for my coverage of the impact of the 2004 state law that made it easier for utilities to shut off service to people behind in their bills. The law led directly to five deaths and as many or more serious injuries in fires and carbon monoxide incidents in houses where the power had been turned off. Ford Turner won for feature writing, Jan Murphy for her capital coverage, Joe Hermitt for photography, and many more. The Patriot-News won the Division I sweepstakes in the Keystone Press Awards, beating out the Philadelphia Inquirer and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
We aren't the only newspaper people whose papers have declared war on them because they want to be represented by a union. At the York Daily Record, which won the sweepstakes in Division II, the Guild local is in a death struggle with newspaper magnate Dean Singleton of Media News. Singleton acquired the Daily Record a couple of years ago in a strange deal that the Newspaper Guild is pushing to have investigated by the U.S. Justice Department. Singleton is a hardball publisher. He hired King & Ballow, the Tennessee law firm which specializes in newspaper union busting, to "negotiate" a new contract with the Guild at the Daily Record. When a new owner acquires a newspaper, they must negotiate with the existing union but can force them to renegotiate the entire contract from scratch. That is a long--in many cases, years long--process. And when King & Ballow is involved, expect a war of attrition.
During the cocktail hour after the APME Awards, I chatted with Lauri Lebo, who is active with the Guild at the Daily Record. She was the lead reporter for the Daily Record on the Intelligent Design controversy at the Dover, Pa., school district, and is writing a book about that. She told me how the Daily Record, apparently at the advice of King & Ballow, won't let members of the Guild contract negotiating team, including herself, take unpaid time off to negotiate the new contract. They are forced to use up their vacation days. That's virtually unheard of in labor negotiations, and arguably a violation of federal labor law, but whether the National Labor Relations Board will do anything about it is hard to say. That's the reality unions face after 25 years of Reagan and Bush union bashing (Clinton could ease it only a little because of his weak influence on the Congress). The NLRB might rule that what the Daily Record did was an unfair labor practice, but it might take 1-2 years to issue that ruling. Labor law is meaningless without strong enforcement.
The Patriot-News has taken a different approach to union busting, dangling economic incentives in front of members to entice them to vote out the Guild on June 2. If that happens, everything the union has negotiated since 1934 will go in the trash. Some of the decert proponents are saying, we can always vote the Guild back in if the company doesn't live up to its promises. Fat chance of that. The company can do much to make sure that never happens. And if we did vote the Guild out and vote it back in, we would start from zero in negotiating a new contract. Just like the Guild at the Daily Record.
Newspapers face a host of economic and cultural challenges, most of which stem from a perception that they are irrelevent in the Internet Age. But instead of working together with their talented professional newsroom staffs to showcase the real value newspapers still have, they pursue ancient vendettas against the Newspaper Guild.