Plain Dealer (Cleveland), December 21, 2004, Tuesday

Copyright 2004 Plain Dealer Publishing Co.
Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

December 21, 2004 Tuesday
Final Edition; All Editions

SECTION: BUSINESS; Pg. C1

HEADLINE: Youngstown paper, strikers dug in;
No talks planned in 5-week walkout against Vindicator

BYLINE: Alison Grant, Plain Dealer Reporter

BODY:
Youngstown - This hard-off Mahoning County city is weathering its first newspaper strike in 40 years, and neither side appears to have much give left.
Local 34011 of the Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America rejected the Vindicator's "best and final offer" by a 99-36 vote on Dec. 8. No new talks are scheduled in the five-week walkout.
The Guild said it accepted four years of concessions - wage freezes, the elimination of shift differentials, employee contributions to health insurance premiums - only to have the company ask for more.
The newspaper's general manager, Mark Brown, said the company has been losing money since 1997. Standing before a row of hulking letterpresses, a printing technology so old that fewer than 2 percent of U.S. dailies still use it, Brown said the company "started trying to raise money" for better presses more than 10 years ago.
In a region with a history of rugged corporate-labor clashes going back to John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, the dispute doesn't seem likely to fade politely.
"People will say you have very militant unions," said Youngstown State University Professor John Russo, "but this town also was brought up with some of the roughest management types in labor history."
The showdown is being carefully watched in an industry in which strikes are rare and often bruising. A 1990s confrontation with two Detroit papers ended with workers returning to their jobs under essentially the same contract they had rejected five years earlier, while the papers lost a combined 288,000 subscribers and more than $100 million.
Brown, 45, is spending long days in the Vindicator's mailroom. He even sleeps in the plant, on an air mattress.
The paper has kept publishing, and he said circulation has risen by 50 since pickets went up.
The Guild accused the Vindicator of ignoring customer requests to cancel; Brown disputed that.
Before the strike, it had reported a daily circulation of about 70,000 copies, and on Sundays about 25,000 more than that.
Those still working include managers, temporary workers and members of two unions whose contracts did not expire - pressmen and composing room workers - as well as 11 Guild members who resigned from the union and returned to work soon after the Nov. 16 walkout. No Guild member has gone back since; 171 editorial and circulation employees remain on strike.
The family-owned publication also is using nonunion editorial workers from out of state. Three papers owned by Advance Publications Inc., which also owns The Plain Dealer, have reportedly lent employees. Those papers had no comment. At least one other company is reported to have provided some help, and the Youngstown Business Journal said college students were being offered jobs.
The replacements arrive in vans with tinted windows while guards stand sentry. Brown agreed to an interview in an ink-scuffed lunchroom near the presses, saying the newsroom was off limits to protect the identity of temporary workers.
Between six and 10 editorial employees from other papers have come to Youngstown, he said.
The union reported they are getting $20 an hour, more than the $713.20 a week earned by top-scale Vindicator reporters - in addition to their salaries from their hometown papers and a stipend for food and housing. Brown said the Vindicator is paying out less than it cost to employ union workers, counting benefits.
The strike shows signs of taking a toll. Delivery glitches have cropped up, and the paper depends more on wire-service copy than before the strike. A local store owner, Bea Lindsey, said she's gotten two issues delivered to her house in Youngstown since mid-November.
Loaned employees are in the tradition of newspapers helping each other when hit by floods and hurricanes. But they've also been used to weaken strikers, said Kate Bronfenbrenner, a Cornell University specialist on labor organizing. The industry, she said, "has a long history of breaking unions, there's no question. These family businesses are the worst, because they take it all very personally."
Brown said he will not hire permanent replacements and vowed that the Vindicator will remain union.
The Vindicator tapped outside help so editorial and circulation employees would have a paper to come back to, he said. "They label them strikebreakers. I label them job savers."
Solidarity in Youngstown
Sympathy for the strikers is strong in a community where the United Steelworkers of America gained an early toehold at Youngstown Sheet and Tube and other "Little Steel" plants, and where a 1966 mass resignation of nurses was the first concerted labor action by that profession in the country.
Union membership is denser here than practically anywhere in the country -25 to 30 percent of the population, Russo said.
But Youngstown today is a region of double-digit unemployment - 13.3 percent in November - still trying to recover from a steel economy collapse that began in 1977.
"Times are very hard," said Lindsey, who runs Howard's News and B&B Ladies Unique Boutique with her husband on downtown's half-deserted Federal Plaza.
Drivers toot their car horns at parka-clad strikers stomping off the chill outside the Vindicator a few blocks away. Police Chief Robert Bush stopped by once and rolled down his window to take a copy of the Valley Voice, a weekly strike paper that was out, the union proudly noted, 72 hours after pickets went up.
Between shifts on the picket line, strikers congregate at headquarters around a table strewn with the Valley Voice, pizza slices on paper plates and a freshly oiled chainsaw for the pallets of wood outside.
Scrawled signs list contributors - the Tri State Marine Corps Ladies Auxiliary, Rising Sun Baptist Church, Great Harvest Bread Co. - and donations - "Wood!!!" "Homemade soup!" "Delicious cookies!"
The local's president, Anthony Markota, says morale is high. They hit the street Friday with 51,000 copies of the Valley Voice after a noontime rally outside the Vindicator's gray stone offices that featured the snapping drums of a 32-member squad from the Ebeneezer Church of God in Christ.
A lot is at stake
Brown said he had made no strike preparations and was surprised by the union's decision to walk. He called the fight "suicide" in a region where competitors in Warren and Lisbon, Ohio, Sharon, Pa., and other cities are eager for a bite at advertisers.
The union agreed that the stakes are high. "I don't think this company has the wherewithal to withstand a long strike," said Linda Foley, president of the international Guild.
Forty years ago, an eight-month strike at the Vindicator involved all unions. It was several months into the walkout before the paper resumed publishing. Even then, it came out sporadically. Times have changed.
The international Guild recommended that Youngstown workers accept the Vindicator's latest offer.
When they voted it down, though, the Guild closed ranks. It is providing each striker $300 in weekly strike pay and health coverage. It also has sent a representative to try to encourage negotiations.
"I'm convinced that we will get past this in Youngstown," Foley said, "and that we will reach a settlement."
To reach this Plain Dealer reporter: agrant@plaind.com, 216-999-4758

GRAPHIC: GUS CHAN THE PLAIN DEALER Youngstown Vindicator circulation department employee Michael Lyden saves his cap from a sharp wind last week on a picket line outside the newspaper. Lyden and other members of the Newspaper Guild went on strike against the Vindicator over wages, benefits and what they called a breakdown in trust with newspaper managers.
GUS CHAN THE PLAIN DEALER John Bassetti splits blocks of maple to stoke the barrel used to warm strikers outside the Vindicator. Bassetti got the wood from a tree removal service. "The guys, they were sympathetic to our problem," the sportswriter said.
GUS CHAN THE PLAIN DEALER Vindicator General Manger Mark Brown says the newspaper has lost money for seven years.
GUS CHAN THE PLAIN DEALER Signs and an umbrella await pickets at the strike headquarters of Youngstown Newspaper Guild Local 11. Vindicator General Manager Mark Brown said he has hired temporary replacements so that employees would have a paper to come back to. "They label them strikebreakers. I label them job savers," Brown said.