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Labor showdown at the Pioneer Press
by Jeff Horwich, Minnesota Public Radio
August 19, 2003

A number of Pioneer Press employees have taped black bands onto their company ID cards as a protest during the labor dispute. (MPR Photo/Jeff Horwich)

This week the biggest union at the Minneapolis Star Tribune is expected to approve a new contract. This could put new pressure on labor negotiations at its rival paper in St. Paul. Union leaders at the St. Paul Pioneer Press have been locked in talks with management, hoping to avert a strike. The contract for the paper's largest union expired more than a year ago. Crafting a new one has been slow and acrimonious.

St. Paul, Minn. — In St. Paul, the news took a break for a few minutes on a recent Friday. About 60 Pioneer Press employees, many from the newsroom, gathered with picket signs to sing protest songs in front of the paper's downtown headquarters.

Workers with the Minnesota Newspaper Guild Typographical Union have been without a contract for more than a year. The Guild represents 480 people, about half the paper's workforce.

	"Black Fridays" outside Pioneer Press

Karl Karlson is a reporter and union negotiator.

"We have some people down here from advertising, some from our library, artists, reporters ad salesmen," Karlson said. "We're not just a newsroom. We represent the whole paper."

Union leaders say they're battling more than just local managers. The Pioneer Press is owned by California-based Knight Ridder, the second-largest newspaper company in the country. Workers don't doubt Knight Ridder's ability to play hardball. In 1995, in Detroit, the company fought and won the most brutal newspaper strike in recent memory.

The sides are wrangling over insurance costs and wages; workers are used to four percent raises, the company wants the top rate at three percent. But the biggest sticking point may be so-called "strike sympathy language." This allows the Guild to walk out in solidarity if one of the paper's smaller unions goes on strike. Reporter Kristina Torres covers higher education, and attended the recent protest.

"Strike sympathy language is almost the backbone of having a union," Torres said. "And not having that is almost untenable."

	Taylor: Strike would be "a failure on both sides."

Management is equally adamant. Jill Taylor is vice president of employee relations.

Strike sympathy language "has to go," she says.

"Our belief is that if we have a contract with employees, they need to work during the term of that contract, regardless of our dispute with another union. It's not unusual language. It's in contracts across the country."

Taylor says unions at Knight Ridder papers in Lexington, Kentucky; Monterey, California; and Akron, Ohio are doing just fine without a strike sympathy clause. On the question of wages and benefits, Taylor says the company is still offering some of the best compensation at any paper this size.

	Facing off

"Our wage package is extremely competitive. Baltimore, Buffalo, Philadelphia, the Seattle Times -- none of them had a three percent raise," Taylor said.

The problem, some workers say, is that the Pioneer Press is not competing with Baltimore. It's competing with the Star Tribune, owned by the Sacramento based-McClatchey chain. Knight Ridder shrunk the Pioneer Press newsroom with a series of buyouts two years ago. Union co-chair Scott Carlson says squeezing the newsroom is not the way to win back readers and staff the paper has lost to its bigger rival in recent years.

"I think in some areas of our newspaper the coverage has never been better," Carlson said. "I think where the concern comes in about the quality of the newspaper is just the mere fact that we have some beats now that aren't covered any more. We don't have a full-time pop-music critic. We don't have a full-time small business reporter. We don't have an editorial cartoonist."

Some workers saw the April layoff of cartoonist Kurt Anderson as an act of bad faith. Still no one seems eager for a strike. One advertising employee says she can't afford a strike right now, and wants the situation resolved as soon as possible.

Columnist Ruben Rosario has been through three strikes during his career.

"My heart is very hopeful that they're going to settle this thing in the final hour. My head says I'm smelling the same kind of approaching storm that I smelled twelve years ago at the NY Daily News," said Rosario. "I think it could happen."

If a strike begins, the Guild says it has commitments from readers and other unions to cancel 20,000 subscriptions. Management and the union both say they're ready to publish separate and competing papers if half the Pioneer Press staff does walk off the job.

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