I've discovered a major downside to blogging. If you want to go find somebody's blog, and they aren't on the "most recent updates" or "most-read" sites, HOW do you find them? There needs to be a search function in the blogs area, methinks.
If there is one that I'm not aware of, I apologize. Bear with me, I'm new to blogging. I haven't even figured out how to do the links-on-the-side thing yet.
However...
All the fuss and furor over the potential baseball strike got me to reminiscing.
It was a very small "chain" of weekly papers. Three to be exact. And the third was added more for vanity reasons than economic reasons, since it was clear we would never pick up the ad revenue from the existing across-the-state-border papers our publisher swore he was after (since the Other Guys, who I had previously worked for) had crossed the border themselves and managed to cut into our ad revenues.
The operation had a total of one executive editor, one managing editor, three reporters, one editorial assistant (me), one secretary, one advertising executive, three to five ad reps on any given day and a business manager who hid out in a back office and told great stories when you wandered back into his domain.
We were owned by a daily paper, part of a group of "media concerns" which included daily and weekly papers, a few television stations and a handful of radio stations scattered across the country. So there was money in the organization. That much I knew. And that weekly newspapers were the "cash cow" of the print industry I also know. Good ad revenue for little actual expense.
But I also knew that our entire "editorial department" consisted of six people, two of whom were distinctly "management". And the executive editor was retiring.
So when Cindy (*names changed to protect long-standing friendships) offered to drive me home that day, I was puzzled, but not suspicious, although I only lived a block and a half away from work.
She parked in the lot behind my apartment, turned off the engine and handed me a small, blue card. (Yes, all these years later, I still remember the color of that damn card.)
"We've been meeting for the past several weeks," she told me, "and we've decided to join the union at the main paper. You don't have to, of course. Here's the card. The rest of us have signed. If you're going to sign, you have to get it in by tomorrow, though, o.k.? Thanks."
That was it. That was my full explanation of what had apparently been going on for some weeks unbeknownst to me. Which was scary. Because my family had always been union and one thing I knew - the point of unions was "safety in numbers". Get enough people together and you can claim some power for yourself. But we were tiny. Only four of us were eligible for this. How would it work? WHY would it work?
I tried asking questions, but got few answers. The decision had been made. The other cards had been signed. My decision was up to me.
On the surface it should have been simple, but of course it wasn't. The publisher of the main paper and, by extension, our publisher, had taken an interest in me about a year beforehand. He'd helped me out with clothing and getting into an apartment. When I'd lived farther away and had no car, he'd arranged for me to get rides home from the other employees. In short, he'd been more than kind to me. This would be something of a slap in the face to him.
Moreover, it would be a pointless slap in the face. We were four women at a small weekly outfit. Only one of us had been with the paper for any significant amount of time, the rest were all relatively recent acquisitions. And, bottom line, we could all be replaced. Easily. There was little hope that a union effort would succeed under those conditions.
But...there was the main union, which had been in place for some time. We would only be joining them, right? So we'd just get whatever contract they had, possibly modified to a slight extent to allow for our size and relative unimportance.
Plus, as Cindy had said, everyone else had signed their cards. I'd be the only one who hadn't, if I didn't.
But then, there was the publisher, a kind man who might not pay a lot, but who gave health insurance, life insurance, paid vacation and 401K benefits to even part-time employees. Never mind the personal interest he'd shown in me. Did I really want to hurt him like this? All for an effort that was doomed before it started?
The next day I turned in my card. Signed.
Of course, only then did I learn that we weren't going to be "part" of the main union (which wasn't a "union" proper, but a "guild"). We were going to be a "separate bargaining unit". I groaned as I saw this particular plan crashing into the deck and burning merrily. But I was "in" so I kept an open mind.
And the first thing that happened was a small slap in the face. From a friend.
The managing editor was a really nice guy. We all liked him a lot. And we respected him, because he was good at his job. He had two small children, a daughter and a son. He used to tell us about doing his daughter's hair before school every morning. So that year, for his birthday, we got him a small, plastic Sesame Street lunchbox and filled it with little-girl hair paraphernalia, bows and barrettes and tiny scrunchies. It was carefully wrapped and, per office tradition, I made a card for him, which we all signed. Then we put the wrapped gift, with the card on top, on his desk while he was in a business meeting upstairs at the main paper (we were housed in the basement at this time).
I will always remember clearly what happened next. He returned from his meeting and stopped next to his desk, staring down at the gift. He just stood there for the longest time, staring at it, expressionless. It must have been two or three minutes before he moved.
He picked up the gift and the card, held them for a moment then crossed over to Ann's desk and laid them down gently.
"I'm sorry. I can't accept this," he said quietly. Then he sat down at his desk, turned to his computer and began typing. The silence was thick. It lasted for the remainder of the afternoon. It's aftereffects lasted much longer.
The next thing that happened was that we got co-opted. Our executive editor retired and instead of replacing him, our managing editor was elevated to his job title, though his day-to-day responsibilities did not change. However, that left the managing editor position open.
Imagine the shock when Cindy announced that SHE had been given the position. Not that she didn’t deserve it, she'd been with the paper since it's inception and had done everything from delivering it to writing it. But it was still a shock. Especially since that made her management.
I couldn't blame her for taking the position. She'd recently adopted a daughter and her main reason for getting behind the union effort was a real need for more income. This job promotion was more likely to give her the pay raise she needed than the union effort. Still, it was a shock to the system for the rest of us.
We were down to three members.
Cindy had been "point man" in our nascent bargaining unit. She had been the face-to-face person with management. Now Ann decided that SHE should have that position, and Gail was perfectly content to let that happen. Gail was the most recent addition to our staff and her husband was facing the almost-certain shutdown of his energy company job. He'd already begun sending resumes out all over the country. Gail fully expected to be moving away within the next several months. She had little stake in this effort.
It was Ann who had apparently instigated the unionizing effort to begin with. She had lobbied for a raise and had been told she was at the "top of her salary range", a mythical and widely-thought-of-as-arbitrary number that meant no salary hikes other than cost-of-living. Ever. So she'd tried an end-run around this system. Hence the union effort.
We were asked to vote her in as leader at the next group meeting of the main guild group. I knew Ann and liked her, but realized she should NOT be the person to deal directly with the company. Of course, Gail wasn't a likely candidate, either. And, although I'd never been in a leadership position in any union, I'd at least had enough experience with unions to know what to expect. Plus, I was older than the other two by at least 10 years.
But it was never going to happen. Ann wanted the position, Gail didn't care and would vote for her. When the guild president asked if there were any more candidates for the position, I remained silent and voted for Ann. I did so with a sinking feeling that turned out to be positively prescient.
Because Ann had all the enthusiasm and drive. What she lacked was the experience. And the backbone.
Management was relatively polite from what I heard. Condescending as all get-out, but terribly polite. We had drawn up a list of demands, aided by representatives from the main guild. These were read and put aside politely. We were offered a ten-cent-an-hour raise across the board.
At the time, the highest paid among us was making $10 an hour. I was considered part-time, not allowed to work more than 32 hours in a week, making $7 an hour. This was four years ago as I write this. I can remember my fury when I was told. "Hey!" I yelled, slapping the table. "I'm not blond, I'm not Candice Bergen and a dime does not impress me!"
Ann was convinced that this was progress. "At least they offered something," she said. The guild was less sanguine and made up buttons and desk-placards in support of our efforts.
The next move on management's part was to move us out of the area completely. We had been located in a city near the lakefront, the home of our parent paper and the town that the oldest of our three papers covered exclusively. Now the editorial department, with the exception of the executive editor, was being moved to a smaller town "out in the county", which we were told would facilitate our coverage area for the second of our three papers, which covered the rest of the county. It was also slightly closer to the towns and villages across the state border that our third paper had recently begun covering.
But it was something else as well. It was inaccessible except by private car. There was no "public transportation" as such going out to this village. And my car, as management well knew, had died some months previous. Making $7 an hour, I wasn't likely to get another anytime soon. They knew that too. And if I couldn't get to the new office...
I think they thought they had it covered, until I did an end run. I knew the publisher was backing his "team" in the negotiations, but I also knew he never got his own hands dirty in such a fight. He was a gentleman of the old school. He let his hired hands do that stuff. He wanted to consider himself above that sort of thing.
And I took shameless advantage of this. I went to him. Directly. Walked into his office one afternoon, sat down, smiled at him and asked him directly to approve my managing editor's offer to drive me in and out of work. It meant officially putting me on first shift (I'd been the only second-shift person at the paper) and allowing "management" to "consort" with "the enemy". But it was allowed. Formally. The union effort lived on. It was shaky, but it lived on.
The next thing that happened was less pleasant. Gail wasn't the most stable of people. Easily emotional and far less emotionally committed to her job than the rest of us, it only took an over-the-top series of beratings by our new executive editor to get her to slam her notebook down one day shortly before the Great Move and quit.
I forget what she'd been raked over the coals for that day. I think she'd blown off an assignment due to extremely bad weather. She had a tendency to do that and I couldn't blame our editor for being annoyed, but he also knew that yelling at her in the middle of the office would, eventually, wear her fragile ego down enough to just say the hell with it. Which she said. She had a new, better-paying job within two weeks and a month later, she and her husband moved out of the area entirely.
We were down to two people now
The drive out to the county office was a pain, made worse because Cindy had to come across town first to pick me up, then drop her daughter off at day care, then head out for the office. In the evening, she reversed the procedure. It was above-and-beyond-the-call and I'll always be grateful to her for doing it.
But my job was somehow changed, without being formally changed at all. Previously, I'd sat at a desk with the rest of the editorial department in the one large room we all shared. In the new office there was a small room that Cindy took for her own office and a slightly larger room where Ann sat. There was a desk in there for a potential replacement for Gail, but nobody sat at it.
I sat in the "lobby" area, at a desk normally reserved for the secretary. Which I was told I was now functioning as, though I kept my old title. I had all my old duties as well, except I wasn't supposed to write any "news" stories anymore. (We were a "happy talk" type paper, and actually only ran features.) I could still do the unbylined advertorials and rewrite the press releases, but that was all. This was a move on management's part to attempt to say, during negotiations, that I wasn't really "editorial" and shouldn't be part of the contract negotiation process. Not that it ever got that far, but that seemed to be their intent.
Still, with only one reporter and one editor doing the bulk of the writing for three papers, our executive editor filling in where he could and a small raft of columnists and stringers, they were forced to use me a few times. But not my byline. Cindy let me write several stories over the next few months, but also made me change my name so "management" never found out what I'd done.
I should have refused, but I loved writing and Ann didn't care. It meant less work for her. And she was working herself to the bone. With nobody technically covering the "third" paper, we were filling that space with rewritten press releases and usable copy from the other two papers, along with columnists and other filler. Still, it was a thin little paper and revenues weren't what they might have been, so Ann was being stretched to the max covering, essentially, two counties by herself.
Still, we managed for almost a year under these conditions. And got along with each other, despite the union effort.
The day we moved into the new office, however, there was an immediate problem. I sat down at my new desk and began arranging it, getting the computer monitor in the spot I wanted it, adjusting the chair, setting up my inbox...and putting my union placard on the corner of the desk where it could be seen by anyone entering the room.
Cindy went into the small kitchen on the far side of the "lobby" and was headed back to her office when she spotted the placard. Without breaking stride she plucked it off my desk.
"This is the reception area. Anyone at all might come through that door,” she said, pointing at the main entrance, which could only be accessed by climbing up a steeply treacherous wooden outside staircase to our second-floor office. “We can have these in the back office," she pointed to Ann's room, "but not out here." She then vanished into her office, with the placard. I didn't bother following her. Instead, I picked up the phone and called the representative from the main guild.
An hour later, Cindy came out of her office and sheepishly returned the placard. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have even touched your stuff."
"It's o.k.," I assured her. And it was. We were all "feeling our way" through this mess and a little overreaction was inevitable. It was never mentioned again.
The main guild tried a "job action" next, since "negotiations" had dragged on for almost 10 months at this point. I was unsurprised by this, but it seemed to shock and confuse the others. They had expected the effort to take far less time. I figured that management was just waiting 'till either Ann or I called it quits. They had no real reason to cave at this point, if they'd ever had a reason in the first place.
The "job action" consisted of a few guild members handing out flyers explaining our "struggle" on the street outside the main paper during the business day, and a stack of the same flyers placed inside the break room at the main paper. Since there were only two of us at the county office, both working the same shift, there was nobody available to hand out flyers in front of our office.
The newspaper reacted immediately and publicly, with an editorial disparaging the action and painting it as an illegal quasi-strike, which of course it wasn't. It was the mildest of "actions" and had no real teeth behind it. People not actually working that shift were the ones handing out the flyers and they were on the street outside the office, not on newspaper property at all. There were no pickets, just a few people standing on the corner, handing out flyers. The rest of the "illegally distributed" material was sitting on a table in the break room, until management removed it. Such a furor over a few pieces of paper that few would ever bother reading! What would they do in the event of a "real" strike?
Not that one was ever really likely. Because the next thing that management, months later, proved decisive. They offered another "compromise", but with an edge to it.
They'd give Ann about a third of the raise she'd asked for, offer nothing for me...and rescind all paid vacations for all employees of our paper.
It was silly, it was an empty threat...and it worked. Ann hesitated for almost two weeks, wringing her hands and agonizing over her potentially lost vacation while the guild representative tried to assure her that nothing of the sort would or could happen without affecting the non-union employees, who wouldn't stand for it.
But, after almost two years of this, Ann was tired and worn down and had possibly never really been up for the full effort at all. She'd been the most surprised of all that negotiations had lasted as long as they had. She'd expected a few meetings and a quick resolution. But then, she knew nothing about unions. And with the constant meetings and cancellation of meetings and postponement of meetings and one thing and another...she was bewildered and confused and clearly wasn't getting what she'd hoped for. Meanwhile, her best friend on the paper was now on management's side, everyone else on the paper except me was avoiding her like the plague and now she was looking at losing the few benefits she had.
She had recently married and she and her husband were hoping to start a family. If vacations could be taken away, so could health and life insurance. And her 401K plan. It was too much.
The next thing I knew, the guild representative called me and said that Ann had called for a vote to dissolve the bargaining unit.
But there were only two of us left in the bargaining unit. I asked him what would happen if our votes cancelled each other out. He said the bargaining unit would be dissolved anyway. I considered the matter and asked if it had to be a vote. He said it did, because of the cards we'd signed.
So they held a vote. A smirking member of management and several lawyers drove out to our county offices and set up shop in the kitchen. Ann and I waited. Finally, our executive editor arrived. They all huddled in the kitchen. Then Ann was called in. She entered. She exited. I was called in. I entered. The lawyer handed me a piece of paper and directed me to the table at the far end of the room, nearest the windows. I filled out the paper with my backs to the others, who stood clustered near the refrigerator at the other end of the room. I put my paper in a cardboard box with a slit cut in the top and returned to my desk. The others remained in the kitchen, talking quietly for a few more minutes. Then they came out, carrying the box. The lawyers and the executive editor left almost immediately. The smirker made sure to thank me for my participation. Then, thankfully, he left.
Ann never asked how I'd voted. I think she'd have been surprised, as I'm sure management was, that I'd voted not to dissolve the unit. Useless as the vote was.
And it all went back to why I'd signed that damned card in the first place. You see, I'd been raised in a union household and had lived through a few strikes. I believed then and believe to this day, that unions are a Good Thing. A Useful Thing. A Necessary Thing.
I believe this ardently. I believe that, unless we stand up for ourselves in the workplace, no employer is ever going to give us more than they are willing to lose themselves. Which is never a whole lot. If we want to better our situation, we are the only ones who can do this. We can't wait for some generous person to realize that we need more than a few kind words. We need to take care of ourselves in the workplace.
Yes, I was grateful to my publisher for the clothes, but I wanted to be able to buy clothes for myself. I was glad he'd helped me find an apartment and had paid the security deposit for me, but I'd have been happier to have been able to pay the security deposit myself. And the only way I'd have been able to do that would have been with a living wage.
My publisher was a kind man. But his kindness wasn't necessarily what I'd needed. What I needed was a living wage. And that was something his bookkeepers weren't interested in giving me. And apparently, neither was he.
Yes, the union effort was doomed from the start. It never would have worked with only the four of us to begin with. But I still believe that unions are important and I never miss a chance to say so.
And that's why I signed the card. Because, like it or not, if you're going to talk the talk, you have to be prepared to walk the walk, no matter how personally discomfiting it may be. If I want the right to say that unions are important and necessary, I can't back down the first time the issue comes up for me personally, just because it's uncomfortable. I'd have to give up my right to say what I believed.
And that right, above all others, is worth fighting for, even when the fight is doomed to failure.
I left the paper about four months after the union was dissolved. I understand Ann left about six months after that. I don't know what happened to her. I don't want to know. Cindy is still with the paper, and doing well. The offices are still out in the county, despite my prediction that they'd move back to the city after the union died. They've hired new people to replace those of us who quit. And, as far as I know, $10 an hour is still the "ceiling" on wages. And that's sad.
So laugh at million-dollar ballplayers going out on strike. And sneer while management walks away with every concession they can. And know that this is due, in part to your laughter and your jeers.
But remember, there are others in this country who both need and deserve the basic human right to try to better their lives. And if you can't respect the players or what they're fighting for, can you at least respect the institution that gives the rest of us a fighting chance?
Because, believe me, unions are still A Good Thing. Without them, major league ballplayers would be making the same salary as a fast food worker. And you, my friends, might be making even less.
10:58:54 AM 
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