Bad News for Labor: New Detroit Newspaper Strike Book Underscores a Broken System

[Omaha Steve]

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/13274/bad_news_for_labor_new_detroit_newspaper_strike_book_underscores_a_broken_s/

By Joe Burns



Members of RADD (Radical Action Disciple Deployment Team) handcuff themselves to the front doors of the Detroit Free Press in support of the Detroit Newspaper Strike. (Photo via the Reuther Library)


In the mid-1990s, 2,500 newspaper workers at the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press engaged in a heroic, high-profile strike against the Gannett and Knight-Ridder newspaper chains. In a five-year battle, workers threw a wide array of tactics against the employer, including a very effective local boycott, a corporate campaign, and extensive unfair labor practice charges. Yet sadly, the strike did not end in a union victory.

Chris Rhomberg, a sociology professor at Fordham University, chronicles the strike in the recently published The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor. Be prepared: This is not a feel-good story. Rhomberg uses the newspaper strike to reveal all that is wrong with the modern system of collective bargaining and striking.

As he writes in the introduction, his book “is addressed to all readers concerned about the future of workplace governance in the United States.” The title of the book refers to how employers have wrecked the collective bargaining table by locking out workers and triggering strikes. As Rhomberg states, “Deliberately negotiating to impasse, unilaterally imposing conditions, and breaking strikes—all of these actions destroy the function of collective bargaining…” With lockouts and employer-provoked strikes on the rise, The Broken Table offers a timely message.

For those not familiar with the Detroit newspaper strike, Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press workers were forced out on strike in 1995 by a management team hell-bent on crushing the newspaper guild union. “The strike was fundamentally not about traditional dollars and cents, but about the control of the workplace and the future of the bargaining relationship,” Rhomberg writes.

FULL story at link.