Stopping the press in Pittsburgh
Gibbons, Russell W.
STOPPING THE PRESS IN PITTSBURGH A CITY REMEMBERS ITS LABOR PAST RUSSELL W. GIBBONS at McDonough, a Teamster delivery driver for the Pittsburgh Press, smiled as he marched past the downtown...
...The Press had not been published since May 16...
...However, bus drivers gained little support and received a critical blow as the newspaper walkout approached its confrontation...
...In several suburban distribution centers, the inevitable smashing of windows and isolated violence took place...
...The union turned over a first-floor meeting hall and offices to the strikers, a command post that would prove invaluable during the strike...
...Public revulsion of bringing in replacement workers—and they are called scabs here—was just too much to take...
...According to the New York Times (August 16), teamster salaries average $43,000...
...If we went to central casting and asked them to bring in some heavies to make stupid decisions, we could not have done better," said George Curtin, a coordinator for the Unity Council...
...The masthead from newspaper pioneer E.W...
...Advertisements placed in Boston newspapers Commonweal 11 September 1992: 9 promised $ 15-hourly wages "for temporary work in a labor dispute...
...These guards were beefed up by other security from Vance International, a Virginia-based agency which has a long track record in labor disputes...
...The paper intends to hire part-time adults to deliver the papers in their own cars instead of the traditional youth carriers...
...Then the company supplemented its own guards with an outside security force, clad in military-type uniforms complete with combat boots...
...A burly retired steelworker, George Edwards, was the first of a dozen to be arrested...
...According to Deborah Reed of Frontlash, a labor-student coalition, grandfathers and senior neighbors, fixed-income seniors, would drive the routes...
...At this point one of the strikers yelled, "Sit down...
...Unions RUSSELL W. GIBBONS is with the Philip Murray Institute of Labor Studies in Pittsburgh, and was director of the 1892 Homestead Strike Centennial...
...such as the steelworkers' and the miners' have taken especially hard hits in the Reagan-Bush decade, a period in which core manufacturing industries declined dramatically in states like Pennsylvania...
...Scripps Company and their Press managers...
...At the Press, management turned to a badly-conceived and crude strategy of bringing in outside replacement workers to drive the routes of 600 Teamsters, who along with most of the other Press unions had been working without a contract since last December...
...Those two work stoppages had mixed results...
...The union disputes the company's figures, and while it acknowledges that staffing changes are necessary, it is unwilling to accept such a deep cut in its membership...
...A termination notice earlier in the year to some 4,300 boys and girls who distribute the Press and the morning Post-Gazette—another tactic in management's new distribution plans—made the newspaper a Scrooge employer from the start of the impasse...
...A warning by the two newspapers that they would resume publication on July 27 "with or without" their union workers set the stage for confrontation...
...Incredibly, intimidating letters were also sent to carriers who distributed the union weekly on their old routes, and who formed effective information lines at Toys 'R Us, an advertiser who patronized the Press's strikebreaking "shopper...
...But the company's next step proved more than counterproductive...
...A local judge issued an injunction barring the newspaper from requiring independent dealers to cross picket lines, saying they were in violation of the state's antistrike-breaker law...
...He authorized the AFL-CIO Strategic Approaches Committee to send in a team to work with the Unity Council...
...Other officials did the same, reflecting the views of Pittsburgh City Council President Jack Wagner who said, "People here look after their own, and today (Continued on page 40) 10...
...Two nights later, perhaps 10,000 people attended a prayer vigil which turned into a "strategic victory" rally when the newspaper announced it was stopping the publication of a nonunion edition it had trucked in from out of town...
...The 5,000 who, along with McDonough, massed July 26 at the Press building surprised the organizers of the Pittsburgh Newspaper Unions Unity Council, a sometimes disparate ingathering of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and ten other unions representing 1,250 members...
...It was the final assault on irate local working people—a newspaper distributed by out-of-state drivers and printed over the border...
...The city responded quickly, declaring that it would revoke the newspaper's tax exemptions because it was publishing outside the city and that it would have to pay occupancy and wage taxes for the replacement workers...
...Shrouded in secrecy, protected by its private security force, the company began to move the replacement drivers into its delivery compound in rented vans...
...STOPPING THE PRESS IN PITTSBURGH A CITY REMEMBERS ITS LABOR PAST RUSSELL W. GIBBONS at McDonough, a Teamster delivery driver for the Pittsburgh Press, smiled as he marched past the downtown building that housed the 108-year-old newspaper...
...A judge ordered 2,700 transit drivers and mechanics back to work in April, and on July 30 the State Supreme Court upheld that ruling, saying that binding arbitration was not required...
...What happened in the forty-eight hours between the first and second demonstration in the center of this city that has symbolized industrial power for much of this century was remarkable even to cynical business observers...
...A scab tax," said Pittsburgh's finance director...
...Some time after 6:30 on the morning of July 27 a phalanx of city police, using billy clubs, attempted to move hundreds of strikers away from the compound entrance...
...And during the past year Pittsburgh has experienced two other significant strikes—a three-week strike by Transit Authority bus drivers and a six-week strike at Giant Eagle, the area's largest grocery chain...
...They are still working without a contract...
...The Press contends that the present distribution system is too costly, and thus it needs to eliminate three-quarters of the present Teamster drivers and distributors...
...The Unity Council puts that figure in the mid-thirties...
...A former communications director of the United Steelworkers of America, he is co-editor of The River Ran Red: Homestead 1892 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) and a contributor to Labor Conflict in America (Garland Press, 1990...
...Everyone knows someone who lost a good job, and many of them experienced it in their own family," says labor economist Edmund Ayoub of Duquesne University...
...We're finding our way, all right," said McDonough, "and it won't be back into that place until we have a contract...
...The newspapers were being trucked in—first, it was believed, from Ohio and then from Canada...
...Scripps, known to millions in a dozen cities by its lighthouse logo, stood out in the night as thousands of strikers and their supporters encircled the block: "Give light and the people will find their own way...
...his scenario, serious though it is to the Pittsburgh economy, took on an almost comic opera aspect with the daily bungling of the parent E.W...
...It went on to say that the Press's "replacement worker gambit collapsed under pressure from a surprising display of union clout...and overwhelming public support for the strikers...[and which] most observers considered a stunning victory for labor...
...Rumors of an eleventh-hour agreement proved false as pickets reported the sounds of the presses starting up (a week earlier the Press had covered up the display windows that had always offered a view of the mechanical process for both newspapers...
...The management attitude apparently was expressed by Post-Gazette editor John Craig, who said that the drivers had "simply stayed too long at the dinner table...
...The public responded with sympathy and support to the grocery clerks and meat cutters, helping them to win a new contract...
...arlier this year Steelworkers President Lynn Williams could look out of his twelfth-floor office next to the Press building and saw the approaching storm...
...These were dramatic events for union workers and sympathizers in their battle with one of the nation's largest newspaper chains...
...Others immediately took their places, locked arms, and sat down until the police decided that they could not clear the way...
...The mayor of one suburban community ordered a distribution center in his town closed because of code violations and its proximity to a day-care center...
...77 September 1992 Commonweal...
...We couldn't believe it," said McDonough...
...Initially, the newspaper's agenda was to eliminate 450 of the 600 Teamster drivers and implement a new distribution system using some thirty city and suburban drop-off points instead of the thousands of drops the Teamsters make to get the papers to neighborhood route carriers...
...Brown shirts and most of them wore those dark sunglasses like a Southern sheriff...
...A Strikebreaking Bust" headlined the weekly Pittsburgh Business Times...
...More than a hundred replacement workers were transported to Pittsburgh and housed in suburban motels...
...The well-tried labor and civil-rights technique worked...
...The tactic, reported every day on local television and radio, cut into the raw nerve of the Pittsburgh area, still experiencing the aftershock of the almost total shutdown of the Western Pennsylvania steel industry and the erosion of thousands of other manufacturing jobs in the past decade...
...Shortly before the July 26 confrontation, the company lowered the number of jobs it sought to cut to 225...
...The city canceled all police leaves and made a show of force at the newspaper building, which faces a park at the confluence of the three rivers which frames Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle...
...Labor in Pittsburgh, and most other urban centers of manufacturing, has not enjoyed many victories in recent years...
...The company says that each Teamster job costs it in excess of $52,000 annually, factoring in benefits and incentives...
...A few senior citizens are easier to control than one Teamster driver," Reed said...
Vol. 119 • September 1992 • No. 15
