THE UNION-BUSTING POST

...Diuguid says Bradlee and Downie sent, via a "back channel," a message advising foreign correspondents that "we are not trying to pressure you" but reminding them that "your byline is your badge of professionalism" and "we just want you to think carefully about it...

...The Post's pressroom remains nonunion and Havlicek says its 200 employees—more than half of whom are minorities and 10 per cent women—are disinclined to join a union...

...Veteran Post employees recall that in the 1950s and 1960s, when the paper was much smaller and less profitable, management generally had the unions' respect for playing by the rules and keeping its word...

...Printing the paper elsewhere, The Post was able to continue publishing...

...This is a problem we are determined to solve...

...The Guild's action contributed significantly to Post management's success in breaking the pressmen's union and bringing in scab replacements...

...Mintz, who recently retired after thirty years as The Posfs leading reporter on consumer issues and corporate abuses, remembers past Post negotiators as "tough but honorable" in their dealings with the Guild...

...Sherwood recalls that when he announced he intended to put the sign back up, Bradlee responded to this effect: "You do it again and I'll stick it up your ass...

...It also appeared clear to us that the Guild would not, for any foreseeable future, be able to count on solidarity from other unions in the building if it alone refused to honor the pressmen's picket lines...

...If we did strike, this management would hire replacements— and there would be people lined up around the block to take our places...

...Guild activists cite a number of instances when they were singled out for discipline by management—ostensibly for rules violations or poor performance, but actually, they believe, because of their union activities...

...The first crisis under The Posfs new bottom-line labor policies came in late 1973, during negotiations with the printers...

...After thinking it over, she obtained another voucher, brought it to the editor for his signature, and told him what she had done...

...Kay Graham always seemed to have had a pretty good attitude toward the unions...

...Since then, the weakened Guild unit has been singled out by management for hardball tactics...

...The Union Busting Post BY JOHN HANRAHAN Labor Pains at a Liberal Paper When Washington Post reporter Tom Sherwood heard that the newspaper's executive editor, Ben Bradlee, had torn from a union member's desk a Stop Greed sign directed at Post management, he went to Bradlee to protest...

...According to Guild figures, white female reporters earn $120 a week less than white male colleagues "of similar age and tenure at The Post" Polaski says the pay gaps occur not just in the newsroom but throughout Guild jurisdictions in the paper...

...Thinking the pressmen were going back in to run the presses, management agreed...

...Though The Post's Guild contracts were once pacesetters for the industry, the paper's top minimums—the basic salaries paid under the contract to the most experienced employees in each job classification—are now far lower than the rates other major union and nonunion newspapers pay...

...It's what I call our pro-football and pro-baseball problem," says Tom Sherwood of management's contentions that Guild members are being paid more than their fair share...

...Katharine Graham votes more than half of the Class A shares of stock, while she and Donald Graham control well over 40 per cent of the Class B shares...

...Office of Human Rights, Local 35 alleged that The Post discriminates on the basis of race, sex, and age in matters of pay, hiring, job assignments, promotions, terminations, and coerced retirements...

...She said she did this because the editor whose signature she needed was in a meeting...

...This is not a situation like the Iowa Beef packers or Anaconda Copper," where management broke strikes, says Franklin Havlicek, The Post's vice president for industrial relations...

...With that, all of the craft unions walked out and ringed the building with a picket line...

...Even without the one-time gain, its profits were up 32 per cent over the previous year...

...It's a sad thing for me to say it, but in my time in being active in union work I would have to observe that what they're doing is union-busting...

...Under an open-shop arrangement with The Post, Guild Local 35 represents some 800 of 1,350 employees in the newsroom and in circulation, display, and classified advertising departments and other offices around the newspaper...

...Research for this article was supported, in part, by a grant from Essential Information, Inc...

...In 1974, the Guild weakened itself by undertaking a most unusual strike...

...The National Labor Relations Board found, in response to a charge by the Guild, that there had not been a true bargaining impasse and that The Post has not been negotiating in good faith...

...That's what I want...

...on Sundays, when The Washington Times does not publish, The Posfs circulation leaps to 1,112,300...

...Although a public company, The Post is still controlled by the Graham family...

...After hearing of this, some Guild members who were less than enthusiastic about the byline strike said it made them so angry that they would participate after all...

...He said The Post had "turned the clock back to the long-discredited tactics of the take-it-or-leave-it era of management authoritarianism...

...The Washington Post anti-union...

...Given the apparent inability to strike, the Guild has tried other tactics to put pressure on management, boost morale, and show employees' displeasure at the company's labor-relations policies...

...I have weeded people out, but at great anguish to me, great personal cost...

...II The Post's refusal, since 1987, to deduct union dues from the paychecks of new employees...

...At about the same time, The Post secretly undertook what came to be known as "Project X" to develop an in-house strikebreaking capability in the event of a walkout by key craft unions...

...He just got caught up in it...

...The Guild-management confrontation "seems so anachronistic," Bradlee adds...

...I don't think they're appropriate there...

...But labor relations at The Post would never be the same again...

...four television stations...

...When the last contract expired in July 1986, negotiations continued until management declared an impasse in August 1987 and unilaterally imposed its "final offer...

...Many of them also lost their homes, their cars, their life savings...

...This swing to the right in labor relations has been marked by a corresponding rise in conservatism in Post editorials and on the op-ed pages...

...In his short time on the job, Havlicek— according to officials of several Post unions including the Guild—has been much prompter and more agreeable than Wallace in processing grievances...

...Although never as liberal as its conservative critics made it out to be—The Post, for example, gave its editorial support to the Vietnam war throughout the 1960s—the paper's editorials have grown more conservative in the Reagan years, and the op-ed pages have provided a feast of conservative and neo-conservative columnists, leaving liberal writers in a distinct minority...

...the Everett (Washington) Herald...

...The Posfs circulation, with a daily figure of 769,000, is at least seven times that of the Moonie paper...

...At least at The Post, unfortunately, I think the strike is a museum piece," says Sherwood...

...The Guild is the largest of nine unions at the paper that represent about 2,000 employees covered by ten contracts...

...Many respondents—all of whom were quoted anonymously—complained that top editors placed barriers to the hiring and advancement of minorities and women, pushed employees out once they reached the age of fifty-five, and had created an uncaring and needlessly tense atmosphere...

...On management's part, there have been outdated and abusive labor tactics and a warfare-with-the-work-force mentality ever since they worked on busting the craft unions in the mid-1970s...

...It's a Teflon newspaper," explains one prominent former Post writer who doesn't wish to be named...

...If relations between The Post and the Guild are tense, management insists that is not the case with the newspaper's other unions...

...If The relative decline of Guild salaries at The Post...

...Some costs resist more stubbornly than others...

...In the lower-paying Guild jobs, employees are even worse off compared to their counterparts at other papers...

...A nine-month grand-jury investigation produced only a handful of misdemeanor pleas, but sapped the union's strength and treasury...

...But events of the last fifteen years tend to bear out critics' contentions that Katharine Graham, the seventy-one-year-old board chairman of the Washington Post Company, and her forty-three-year-old son, Donald Graham, the publisher of the newspaper, have severely crippled what was once a strong union presence in their downtown Washington plant...

...I don't know why minorities have to be paid less...

...One of the best-kept secrets in journalism is the transformation of The Washington Post into a right-wing newspaper," says consumer advocate Ralph Nader...

...Meyer was succeeded as publisher by his son-in-law, Philip L. Graham, Katharine's husband, who committed suicide in 1963...

...Although many of the Guild members would not have supported the pressmen under any circumstances, some cited the union members' actions at the beginning of the strike as a major reason for their refusal to join the picket lines...

...Stone—and The Post's former labor negotiator, Adrian Fisher...

...I'd have the power to get rid of people...

...Guild members note that the $7.3 million figure dwarfs the approximately $2 million it would take to eliminate the multi-tier pay system and put Guild employees on an equal compensation footing with one another...

...a number of cable television systems...

...The complaint is pending...

...She cites the example of a classified employee who had been in the rest room for several minutes when her supervisor "came and knocked on the door and said, 'Are you almost through...

...Imposition of the multi-tier pay scale is one of the actions that prompted the Guild to file a complaint of race, sex, and age discrimination against The Post last year with the District of Columbia Office of Human Rights...

...Recently, he says, he came across a memo from former editor J. Russell Wiggins recommending that Bradlee not be given a $4-a-week raise...

...with a bottom-line mentality...

...But on the major conflicts between the union and The Post, Havlicek vigorously defends management's position...

...In market value, The Washington Post Company ranked forty-third at $2.64 billion...

...By all indications, the Washington Post Company is not a failing enterprise that needs to cut costs to survive...

...They got hooked on profits...

...The pressmen vigorously denied they had deliberately set the fire, and those involved in removing key press parts said later that their actions hardly constituted "wrecking" the presses, as news accounts in The Post and elsewhere portrayed it...

...Things began to change around 197071," recalls Robert Peterson, president of Columbia Typographical Union 101, the printers' union, which today has about 300 members at The Post compared to 800 in pre-automation days...

...At the moment, The Post is trying to put a better face on its labor relations...

...In June 1971, The Post took its stock public—a step that proved decisive in sending it down the path of anti-unionism...

...Among the signers were then-Representative Andrew Young, Senator Hubert Humphrey, journalist I.F...

...So, when the pressmen's contract expired and their union struck The Post on October 1, 1975, the majority of the Guild unit at The Post—and particularly its newsroom members—were deeply mistrustful of their leaders...

...He wrote that "the purpose of corrective discipline is to demean the employee, in his eyes, in the eyes of his family, and the eyes of his fellow employees—make the demeaning stick with him, by putting the reprimand in writing and mailing it to his home with copies to the union...

...Wallace responded by calling in U.S...

...Although Graham's wife and son were later to send nonunion employees to train to be strikebreakers, Phil Graham reportedly rejected a proposal to take such a step...

...The Guild has experienced particularly hard times at The Post since it—alone among the other unions in the building-refused to honor the picket lines set up by pressmen during a pivotal 1975 strike...

...A bare two weeks after the strike began, chastened Guild members—most of them angry with their leadership—were back at work after being forced to accept basically the same proposal management had offered an hour before the strike began...

...It seems to me they [Post management] have it ass backwards...

...The Post reaches 55 per cent of all households in the Washington metropolitan area on weekdays and 74 per cent on Sundays...

...marshals to remove them, and six men were arrested...

...in earnings twenty-seventh, and in assets sixty-first...

...Writing in The New Republic in the spring of 1977, Henry Fairlie, then a weekly columnist for The Post, charged, "The pressmen's strike was crushed with methods and with a severity that are not usually accepted in the third quarter of the Twentieth Century, and that the press in general or The Post in particular would not be likely to regard as acceptable from the owners of steel mills...

...Under the expired contract, the top minimum for reporters and photographers was $664.35 per week after four years—a figure that ranked The Post forty-third among 120 Guild newspapers...

...In 1973, The Post hired Lawrence Wallace as its chief of labor relations, and he swiftly established a reputation for stonewalling at the bargaining table and using delaying tactics in processing even the simplest of union grievances...

...He denies The Post has engaged in union-busting, and says the infamous Wallace memo, with its references to disciplining employees by demeaning them in the eyes of their families and fellow employees and to dealing more severely with union leaders, is a "bloody shirt" that Guild officials wave when they want to stir up their members...

...We were in a distinctly minority position with a lot of people who were very angry at the Guild because of the pressmen's strike and a lot of others who were shellshocked by the brute force of The Post in breaking the strike...

...In December, the union rejected management's "final offer" which, among other provisions unacceptable to the union, called for the firing of twenty-four pressmen considered troublemakers and a further reduction which would have cost many other pressmen their jobs...

...That night signaled a change," Wallace said later...

...to discourage reporters from participating...

...The first signs of this appeared in January 1972, when Katharine Graham told a meeting of security analysts, "The first order of business at The Washington Post is to maximize profits from our existing operations...

...These range from byline strikes to rejuvenating the Washington Council of Newspaper Unions (the alliance of all unions at The Post) and funneling news items to City Paper, an alternative weekly that enjoys twitting The Posfs brass...

...I was a Local 35 member while I worked at The Post from 1968 to 1976 as a reporter and assistant editor on the Metro staff...

...When are you coming out?' " All of these efforts to cut costs and control the work force at The Washington Post come against a backdrop of increasing profitability—hence the Stop Greed signs that sparked the confrontation between Bradlee and Sherwood...

...Thanks to a one-time gain of $54.3 million from the sale of four SportsChannel cable television networks and its cellular-telephone interests, the Post Company boosted its profits in 1987 to $186.7 million—an increase of 86 per cent over the previous year...

...The Guild said the paper's hit list was weighted against black and older workers...

...I really don't see why The Progressive would be interested...

...Under a plan devised by the local's administrative officer, Guild members voted almost unanimously to "withhold their excellence": they would go out on strike, but they would not set up any picket lines and would not ask the other unions to stay out...

...In response to management's arguments about "average" newsroom salaries exceeding $50,000, Guild members point out that averages can be deceiving: $80,000 plus $20,000 averages out to $50,000, but that is of little comfort to the person earning the $20,000...

...Since the pressmen's strike, Guild members were without a contract from 1976 to 1979, again for sixteen months in 1982-1983, and currently for more than two-and-a-half years...

...And I would say it much more compassionately: the power to find people other jobs...

...When the data are adjusted to reflect reporting experience, the gap is still a whopping $ 170...

...Management has shown it can put the paper out on its own...

...The rationale was that since Guild members wrote and edited the stories, handled circulation calls, took the classified ads over the telephone, and sold the big display ads that enriched The Post, both the public and the paper's management would soon see that the services of Guild members were indispensable...

...Some 200 pressroom employees lost their jobs...

...In classified, supervisors told employees in an October 1987 memo that if they called in sick on a Friday, they would have to bring in a physician's certificate when they came to work on Monday...

...It does all these wretched things to its employees, yet it continues to have this shiny reputation...

...This led to her suspension, which came two weeks after the Guild had conducted a successful byline strike and had filed its age, race, and sex discrimination complaint with the D.C...

...When the average salary [for reporters and editors] is over $50,000, we're not talking about soup kitchens here...

...In another passage, Wallace wrote, "If a union official abuses his leadership responsibilities, accelerate his punishment—e.g., give a written reprimand to the others and give him a suspension, or give him a longer suspension than the others...

...11 The Post's practice of sending nonunion employees to strikebreaking courses and anti-union seminars...

...The printers, in a spontaneous action, staged a sit-down strike...

...I don't like picket signs in the newsroom," says Bradlee, acknowledging the dispute...

...But somewhere along the line she just threw up her hands...

...Guild leaders believe they are in for the long haul at the paper...

...It enjoys a near-monopoly in the nation's capital, its only nominal competition being The Washington Times, the low-circulation, Far-Right publication of Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church...

...Under the plan, some nonunion employees were trained in photocomposition and others were sent to Oklahoma to learn pressroom operations at the publisher-supported, antiunion training center known as Southern Production Program, Inc...

...nounced by Reed Irvine's Accuracy in Media and other right-wingers as a pillar of the Eastern liberal establishment, as Pravda on the Potomac...

...But management personnel, led by Ben Bradlee in the newsroom, put out a paper that, though heavy on wire service copy and big pictures, still looked like The Post that readers were accustomed to seeing every day...

...despite the union's official stand, as many as one-third of the Guild's members honored the picket lines at various times during the strike...

...Havlicek, the new vice president for industrial relations, who came to The Post last August from NBC in New York, presents himself as someone who wants to start with a clean slate in management relations with the Guild unit...

...employees will, and, because they will, are ripped off...

...Donald Graham seems to feel the Guild is part of their problem...

...The average salary for all white males represented by the Guild at The Post is $204 a week more than the average salary for white females, $230 more than the average for black males, and $332 a week more than the average salary for black females...

...After numerous protests, the memo was rescinded...

...The result is that newcomers—including a higher percentage of minorities and women than were previously hired-are paid at far lower rates...

...Office of Human Rights...

...We do have a public-relations problem, but the two-tier pay system is just plain unfair...

...If I had the power to get rid of people, I could put out a hell of a lot better newspaper...

...Says Nelson, "Morale and the commitment of the workers are hurt by the Post's labor policies...

...Sherwood, who then headed the Post unit of Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild Local 35, says he reminded Bradlee—who, ironically, had a Save the First Amendment bumper sticker taped to his office door—that free-speech rights protected the union sign...

...The Post took its best shot at us in the 1970s and failed," says Polaski...

...In the document, leaked to the Guild in 1987, Wallace discussed disciplining workers who violate company rules...

...It hardens attitudes...

...Post officials interviewed for this article said they didn't know or wouldn't say whether The Post is continuing to use such services...

...A month after the printers' contract expired and union members continued to work, management fired printer Michael Padilla for slowing down on the job...

...A fire in one of the presses—never determined to be arson despite a thorough investigation—also caused some damage...

...The long-running battles between the Guild and management have affected morale...

...Membership declined to about 400 before members started coming back when they saw they needed the union...

...Polaski says Guild-compiled data show that black women reporters are paid $240 a week less, on average, than white male reporters—a gap the Guild says has doubled in the last five years...

...The Posfs top executives have profited handsomely...

...Jane Huffman, a research writer/analyst in the market-research department, a member of the Guild bargaining committee and grievance committee co-chair, says classified supervisors "are constantly looking for greater control every second...

...Nelson believes her suspension might have been an attempt to retaliate against the Guild and intimidate its members...

...Guild officials hope this attitude of "a kinder, gentler Washington Post" will carry over to the bargaining table once negotiations are resumed...

...Undaunted, Sherwood reposted the sign...

...I spend months and months trying to build up the team spirit and then the goddamn negotiations come up...

...Now, management acts as if the Guild doesn't have a place in this building," continues Diuguid, who heads the Guild's bargaining committee...

...Often, he says, "there is no connection between Guild rhetoric and reality" when it accuses The Post of "greed and high-handedness...

...In accusing The Post of violating fair-labor standards, not paying reporters overtime, and practicing illegal discrimination, Havlicek says, the Guild has been "very confrontational...

...11 The Post's refusal, until recently, to process union grievances in a timely fashion, often dragging out even the most routine cases for weeks and months at a time— at great expense to the Guild...

...One committed suicide...

...Although Bradlee says he doesn't like byline strikes, "I'm not sure the world gives a rat's ass about not seeing bylines on stories...

...II The Post's imposition in 1979 of a multi-tier pay scale under which recent hires are paid at a lower rate and can never reach the top scale paid to previously hired employees (except through merit-pay increases, which are a management prerogative...

...In the charges it filed last July 13 with the D.C...

...He is a free-lance writer in Washington, D.C, and the executive director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism...

...The pressmen even made Eugene Meyer, Katharine Graham's father who bought The Post at a bankruptcy auction in 1933, an honorary member of their union in the 1950s...

...I didn't think The Post was really capable of what came down in 1975," says Lewis Diuguid, an assistant foreign editor and former South American correspondent for The Post, who honored the picket lines during that strike...

...While other unions at The Post have many complaints about management practices, none seem to match those of the Guild...

...In 1987, according to data compiled by reporter Morton Mintz, the top nine officers of the Washington Post Company pulled in almost $7.3 million in salaries and long-term and annual incentive bonuses...

...A clerk's top minimum under the expired contract was $304.75 after two years—which placed The Post about seventy-seventh among 120 Guild newspapers...

...Bradlee says this does not mean he would like to see the Guild eliminated from the newsroom...

...The same Washington Post regularly deJohn Hanrahan formerly worked at The Washington Post and was a member of its Newspaper Guild unit...

...A survey by Post management of newsroom feelings about the hiring and promotions of blacks for reporters' and editors'jobs, published in January 1986, fairly bristled with negative comments about management's practices...

...The most bitter area of disagreement between Post management and the Guild is the multi-tier pay system and the discrimination charges it has spawned...

...Many Guild employees believe management is either out to weaken their union further or eliminate it outright...

...Reporters' percentage of participation in the 1988 two-day effort was in the high 90s despite—or in some instances because of—efforts by Bradlee and managing editor Leonard Downie Jr...

...It was clear to those of us who supported that strike (as well as to some who crossed the picket lines) that The Post, motivated by a desire to maximize profits at the expense of its work force, intended all along to break its most militant union...

...Graham, for his part, refused to comment to The Progressive on any aspect of The Post's labor policies...

...Newsroom tensions notwithstanding, workers in certain commercial departments—particularly classified advertising and circulation—are regularly treated in a far more demeaning fashion than newsroom workers and most other Guild employees...

...Under the management-imposed terms, this would increase to $367 in three years...

...I hate it when the Guild bulletins go up talking about negotiations," Bradlee says...

...Byline strikes—in which reporters ask that their names be kept off stories—were rated as effective in July 1987 and July 1988 (in observance of the 1986 expiration date of the last contract...

...Katharine Graham led the way with more than $1.5 million—which, by Mintz's calculations, comes to $482.31 an hour...

...Although the incident occurred back in May 1987, the spectacle of one of the nation's best known and most colorful editors tearing down a simple union sign remains an apt metaphor for the sorry state of labor-management relations in the newsroom and commercial departments of The Washington Post...

...Against that backdrop, if there was ever a chance of getting rid of the Guild, it was then...

...On four separate occasions over the next ten weeks, the Guild-alone among the unions at The"Post--voted not to honor the pressmen's picket lines...

...The Post has other things going for it...

...a computerized information service covering Congress, and tutoring centers for standardized testing...

...Bradlee, for his part, says he wishes the tension between management and the Guild would "go away...

...And for lower-paying jobs in Guild jurisdiction—such as clerks—the top scale is not far above the poverty level at $16,000...

...The attitudes voiced by the corporation can make you lose your perspective...

...Sandi Polaski, administrative officer for Local 35 since 1985, says the discrimination is especially dramatic in the area of wages, where management has the right to pay more than the comparatively low pay scales it has negotiated with the Guild...

...She would invite some of us to have lunch with her in her private dining room and discuss problems with her...

...Although as many as one-third of all Guild members observed the picket lines for certain portions of the strike, the rest were inside doing their jobs—and, in some cases, doing the jobs of striking workers in other jurisdictions at the paper...

...In fact, the community was generally unaware that a strike was in progress...

...To exert pressure at the bargaining table, the printers periodically engaged in slowdowns, causing the paper to miss publishing deadlines...

...Instead, the pressmen occupied the pressroom and refused to leave until The Post negotiated on Padilla's firing...

...The strike bitterly divided the Guild unit...

...A plea from more than 100 national and local figures, sent in the form of an open letter and calling on The Post and the union to agree to mediation, was rejected by Katharine Graham...

...In 1987, The Post unilaterally imposed a $767 top minimum for reporters and photographers, which would put the newspaper about twentieth on the list and far below the top minimum of $1,001 at The New York Times, the paper with which The Post most likes to compare itself...

...There's no question this has been an anti-union company since the early 1970s, when it went public with its stock," Sherwood continues...

...Since dues are the lifeblood of any union, the Guild has had to come up with alternative methods of collecting from new members...

...I don't blame Bradlee so much as I blame the anti-union atmosphere created by the management upstairs," says Sherwood, a respected reporter who has been at The Post since 1974 and currently covers the D.C...

...The last Guild contract expired in July 1986, and negotiations for a new contract are stalled...

...The most frustrating kind are those imposed by archaic union practices that deprive the company of the savings we ought to achieve from modern technology...

...When I was hired by The Post" says Havlicek, "there was a real sense on the part of Don Graham that there was a need on the part of The Post to create a new kind of dialogue...

...In addition to The Post itself, the company includes Newsweek magazine...

...It was a battle to force a decision to see who was going to run the pressroom down there...

...I went out in support of the pressmen's strike and decided not to return to work after The Post broke the union and threw 200 union pressmen out of work...

...The company has 6,400 employees—almost half of them at the newspaper—and its assets total $1.2 billion...

...A black woman stated: "I think The Post is a fine place to work for blacks up to a point, then it appears to me some sort of hidden ceiling beyond which blacks aren't allowed to move, except in the smallest numbers...

...Before the pressmen walked off the job on October 1, a small number of them, frustrated by the new hard-line management and deteriorating working conditions, removed and hid key press parts to prevent the presses from being operated...

...Havlicek cites a contract negotiated with the mailers last spring, providing for lifetime job guarantees and a buyout provision in exchange for introduction of new technology, and a similar contract with the printers, as examples of The Post's fair treatment of unions whose jurisdictions are becoming increasingly automated...

...In The New York Times in late 1987, a veteran labor writer, A. H. Raskin, depicted The Post's labor policies as characterized by "arrogance and self-righteousness...

...There is a view, widely held by Post employees, that Wallace was forced to retire to make way for Havlicek, who is reputed to be less provocative and confrontational...

...11A secret internal report written in 1984 by The Post's since-retired top labor negotiator, Lawrence Wallace, that appeared to be the "smoking gun" of the paper's anti-worker policies...

...In the newspaper division alone, revenues rose by 10 per cent in 1987 to $648.1 million, and operating income increased 12 per cent to $145.1 million...

...The signs were used during informational picketing by Guild members during the company's May 1987 stockholders' meeting...

...Some pressmen cut up web rolls and sliced the rubber press blankets...

...Post officials would quickly settle the dispyte, and everyone would be back at work...

...Wallace, who says the Grahams supported him in the labor policies he implemented at The Post, denies being forced out...

...At this point, a confession of sorts is in order...

...By the time of our 1974 negotiations, she was scarcely speaking to us at all...

...I would really question how much good it does...

...11 Disclosure of a memo in July 1986 showing that seventy-four Guild-covered employees in the display advertising department had been secretly evaluated and an arbitrary 20 per cent recommended for early retirement or dismissal...

...Wallace now characterizes the document as "a teaching aid for a training course for supervisors" and "not a statement of Post policy...

...Union officials say only about one in six Guild employees actually earns more than $50,000...

...Mintz recalls Adrian Fisher, who served as The Posfs labor negotiator under Philip Graham, saying some years ago that someone had proposed training strikebreakers, but that Fisher and Graham had agreed it was a bad idea...

...In Post reporter Lou Cannon's mid-1970s book, Reporting: An Inside View, Bradlee was quoted on the steps he would like to take to improve his newspaper: "I have an answer that's so revolutionary and anti-union...

...Last summer, Jill Nelson, a writer for The Post's Sunday magazine and current chair of the Guild unit, was given a five-day suspension for signing an editor's initials to a travel-request voucher for a trip that had been approved...

...in revenues, fifty-first at $1.4 billion for the preceding twelve months...

...A white female reporter commented: "A corporate culture prevails that continues to favor white males in everything from salaries to assignments and promotions— and the paper continues to hire white males from outside for managerial positions instead of promoting women and blacks who are here...

...Most could not find pressroom work elsewhere because anyone who had worked in The Post's pressroom was considered a potential press-wrecker...

...After missing two editions, Katharine Graham said she would put out the paper with nonunion help...

...We can't shut the paper down...

...In breaking the pressmen, Post management not only rid itself of the building's most militant union, but left the other unions badly crippled, with their ultimate weapon—the strike—perhaps gone forever...

...Critics cite these signs of The Posfs anti-worker policies: 11 The Post's refusal over the years to bargain in good faith with the Guild, resulting in protracted negotiations and long periods without contracts...

...According to the Media Business Quarterly Review of 200 publicly held media companies, the Washington Post Company was number one in the key category of earnings per share of stock at $24.32 as of last June 30, ranking it well ahead of such media giants as Capital Cities/ABC, Time Inc., Gannett, Knight-Ridder, the New York Times Company, the Times-Mirror Corporation, Warner Communications, and MCA Inc...

...Bradlee says there was much more need for the Guild in the early 1950s, when he was a young reporter at The Post and pay was low...

...The rationale for this program, Mintz wrote, "boils down to an Orwellian absurdity: unpamp?red by lavish extra pay, executives won't do their best...

...At that point, James Dugan, leader of Pressmen's Local 6, asked Post management to allow him and other press operators back into the building...

...The NLRB issued a complaint against The Post, and a trial on the issue is scheduled for late February...

...Also in classified, employees complain of random telephone eavesdropping by their supervisors...

...When The Post agreed to rehire Padilla a few hours later, the craft unions returned to work...

...His remarks to Cannon, he explains, should be put in the context of his frustration at not being able easily to fire newsroom employees who do not produce high-quality work...

...Meyer, credited with saving The Post by underwriting its deficits, set the course for the paper's successes with his 1954 purchase of The Washington Times-Herald, The Posfs only morning competition...

...In part, the change reflects the general tenor of the Reagan years, Nader says, but he also attributes it in part to The Post's transformation into "a corporate conglomerate...

...Craft-union officials, though, say they have been operating at a distinct disadvantage since the busting of the pressmen's union because The Post knows there is almost no likelihood that any of them will ever strike...

...Post officials claimed millions of dollars worth of damage to the presses, though the company that supplied the replacement parts was later quoted in several news accounts as saying that its bill to The Post was just $13,000...

...In so doing, they have made The Post one of the most profitable papers in the country—an investors' delight...

...mayor's office for the Metro desk...

...The Guild survived a decertification effort just after the pressmen's strike...

...11 Post management's announcement that it wants employees to begin shouldering 20 per cent of the medical-plan costs currently being paid in full by the company...