How does technology affect labor relations and strikes?

Newspaper labor relations, '60s style: Presses are idled as righteous reporters trudge a picket line for a few days to obtain better wages and working conditions.

Labor relations, '90s style: Violence flares as lengthy strikes prove unproductive and production workers become increasingly intolerant of the expanding automation taking place in the newspaper industry.

"Technology is at the heart of the transformation of the relationship between the journalist and the employer," said Leo Bogart, a professor at New York's Columbia University and former head of the Newspaper Advertising Bureau.

Bogart has explored the enormous change newspapers have undergone with the arrival of cold type, computers and digital imaging. He has found that despite being a good thing for the journalistic process -- "making it easier to correct, reorganize and restructure material, and facilitating collaboration between people working on different aspects of a story" -- technology has taken a toll on the union movement.

"What you had was the elimination of whole classes of what were formerly very important employees. All those production functions winnowed down to a few steps of processing," he said.

In some departments, the cuts have been stark.

"Now they have computers that allow one person to run an entire press," said Frank Balentine, press manager for the Newspaper Association of America, in Reston, Va. "In the old days it took five or six."

Balentine pointed out that lowered staffing requirements have given management greater control over the production process. This has served to shift the balance of power away from unions.

Automation has influenced not only the issues discussed by workers and management, it has altered the way both sides handle work stoppages. Technology has played a key role in the 14-month-long strike at the Detroit News and its JOA partner, Knight-Ridder's Free Press, and the 11-day strike at the San Francisco newspapers two years ago.

In both strikes, technology enabled management to continue producing newspapers; before computerization, most papers were simply shut down during a strike.

On labor's side, technology has allowed striking workers to produce their own newspapers, in print and on-line. Without computers -- and the training that workers received before they went on strike -- labor's actions were limited to picket lines and rallies.

In short, technology has made life easier for publishers, with reduced staffing and the assurance of being able to publish during a strike, and harder for unions -- harder to amass significant numbers of members, to retain power at bargaining tables, and to sustain or win strikes.

Technological concerns were not a significant issue in July 1995, when workers at both Detroit dailies walked out, said Bob Giles, editor and publisher at Gannett's Detroit News.

"We weren't trying to displace workers or introduce new technology that eliminated jobs," he said -- issues that have been hot buttons in negotiations at other newspapers over the last couple of decades.

But the strike did provide both the need and an opportunity for the News to take fuller advantage of its technological capabilities. The strategic planning that occurred well before the strike vote by the Newspaper Guild ensured that the paper was in position to move to full pagination and launch its planned on-line product with little or no delay, once union members left the building.

Michael Brown, advanced systems editor at the News, said technologies that have digitized the newsroom with a steady stream of innovation during the last three decades have made it much harder for unions to win strikes.

Brown said that before the strike, the News was "in a position where we needed fewer people, but because of guaranteed jobs, there was no way to eliminate positions. It was a waiting game -- the composing room staff was aging and we knew we could reach full pagination through natural attrition.

"But the walkout provided us with an opportunity to paginate, and there were dozens of people who were no longer needed from that point on."

Thus, the News editorial staff is smaller today than it was before the strike, but its pagination staff has grown. The new hires are mostly copy editors with pagination experience, not just technicians, in order to "keep some brains behind the design," Giles said.

At the News, supervisory positions are exempt from the Guild, and systems people are in supervisory positions. Brown's job encompasses more authority and responsibility than many systems editors have. His domain includes not only all computers, but all production, pagination and makeup processes in the newsroom as well.

His staff comprises management, supervisory or exempt editors responsible for getting the paper out of the newsroom. The investment in training exempt pagination personnel paid off when the strike wore on, as trained people were putting out a paper, not carrying picket signs.

While that's a sound business decision, Brown pointed out that it's also a matter of preventing torn loyalties. "When I hire a person, they're going to have sensitive information from the systems side and it wouldn't be fair to have a union person with that knowledge," he said.

Prior to the strike, the paper was about 30 to 40 percent paginated, moving unformatted files from its 12-year-old System Integrators System/55 via a Macintosh program, Wolferwire (written by the then-head of Gannett technology, Eric Wolferman, who is now a vice president of the NAA), to its Mac network and Quark XPress.

When the strike started, the News and the Free Press combined efforts to put out a daily, with the News putting out the hard news sections with existing equipment. Giles said the effort was so successful that Gannett authorized the purchase of the additional terminals and software.

When the two papers resumed publishing separately, the News became 100 percent paginated.

Early in the strike, pagination made it easier to get a full-bodied product out the door.

"It is clear to me that technology kept us publishing," Brown said. "Without it, it would have been like strikes in the '60s, where it was almost impossible to keep the product coming out. But with the technology, in the newsroom and other phases of pre-press, we didn't miss a publication.

"In the '60s, we would have only been able to publish a skeleton newspaper," he continued. Although the newspaper got smaller because of lost advertising, the staff was able to keep the newspaper intact.

"Technology allowed us to do that," Brown said. "The product was much better early on, and that was directly related to technology issues."

He includes in those issues a whole panoply of technology, including telecommunications. For example, Giles reported that while the paper had already used a lot of wire service copy, there has been a small -- although not critical -- increase in its use in the features section since the strike began.

When a strike looms, security becomes a major management concern. Veteran newspaper people remember the damage the Washington Post sustained during a strike in 1975.

Some of the Post's equipment was damaged so badly -- one of the presses was burned one night -- that people who ran the strike served time in jail, according to NAA's Balentine, who provided six weeks of training to 60 permanent replacement pressmen in Detroit.

With the Post experience in mind, no doubt, Brown said the News had new password files set up on a UNIX machine. Once the strike was announced, all systems were shut down -- Macs, SII and servers -- while union people left the building.

Two hours later, techies brought all the systems back up, overwrote the old password files with new ones and distributed new passwords to people still in the building.

As people have come back from the picket lines, their access to the mainframe has been kept minimal if there is any suspicion at all about their loyalties, until they've proven themselves. Brown said that the Mac system, which is more open, is backed up and mirrored.

Although there has been no sabotage, Giles, a Guild member during the '60s, said the paper has to remain alert to whatever the unions may attempt to do.

"Our vigilance hasn't diminished in any way," he said. "Our mandate is to keep the paper publishing."

That vigilance may have paid off. Heath Merriweather, editor and publisher at Knight-Ridder's Free Press, reported that no extra systems security measures were taken because of "our naive faith in a good relationship that no one would vandalize the system."

Betrayed by the paper's own naiveté, perhaps the union "almost succeeded in causing us to be unable to publish the first night," he said.

-- L. Carol Christopher

From THE COLE PAPERS, September 1996, Copyright © 1996, All Rights Reserved.