V. BARGAINING IN FLUX: LABOR AND MANAGEMENT RESPONDS TO A PERIOD OF UNCERTAINTY

Workers of the World Wide Web Unite!: The Newspaper Guild and Online Newspaper Ventures

HOWARD R. STANGER
Canisius College

Abstract

      Over the last 25 years, newspaper unions have been weakened by new technologies, the consolidation of the industry, the rise of the public newspaper corporation and its insatiable quest for higher profits, public policies, and the failure of unions to merge and consolidate their resources.
      This paper explores the possibility--limited at present--of union rebirth led by the Newspaper Guild, assuming the prominence of the digital newspaper. Specifically, it focuses on the Guild’s various strategies for organizing online newspaper workers. Contractual language includes: strong jurisdiction clauses, recognition clauses, modified jurisdiction clauses, supplemental language, experimental and temporary language.
      The paper also examines some important cases involving the NLRB and the courts, and concludes by speculating about the future of newspaper unionism.

      Since the 1970s, newspaper unions have been weakened by a combination of forces--computerization, the rise to prominence of publicly traded newspaper companies and their insatiable thirst for higher profit margins, and public policies that have facilitated the consolidation of the industry. These forces have altered the balance of power from the unions to the publishers. This can be seen from a number of labor relations outcomes, such as lower union density rates, declining real wages, limited success in representation elections, changes in work rules, union mergers, and the scarcity of strikes. (See Stanger 2002, for an overview of newspaper labor relations since 1975.)

      Publishers have regained control over the production and, to a great extent, the distribution of newspapers. With few exceptions, their dominance is near complete, as strikes have been unable to halt production and distribution of newspapers in most instances. In short, the once powerful craft and drivers’ unions have been tamed. Historically, journalists have been ambivalent about unionism and allying with blue collar unions at the same newspaper. Although the Newspaper Guild represents workers at about 90 newspapers in the United States, publishers have capitalized on the newsroom’s traditional lack of militancy to weaken solidarity during strikes and exact concessions.

      While the newsroom has never been the locus of union power in the newspaper industry, changing technology in the form of the online or digital newspaper opens up the possibility of union rebirth led by the Newspaper Guild.

      This paper discusses the rise of the digital newspaper and the Guild’s strategies for organizing online journalists, and speculates about the future of newspaper unions. While prognostication is always a risky proposition, it is even more so in an industry that employs the latest technologies.

The Rise and Extent of Online Newspapers

      Online newspapers owe their heritage to about 20 years of industry experimentation with electronic delivery, including the failed videotext and the rise of the Internet. It is estimated that in the year 2000, over 67 million households will have had Internet access. In addition, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Americans getting news online at least once a week tripled from 1996 to 1998, to over 36 million and growing. An industry report by the investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston shows that news and information websites had over 56 million unique visitors in October 2001. It also reports 100 million unique visitors for all World Wide Web sites for the same period. The Internet’s popularity gives online newspapers a good chance to succeed (Chyi and Sylvie 1998:1; CSFB 2001:25).

      Newspaper companies have increased their online offerings to meet the new demand. In 1994 there were 20 online editions; in 1997, there were 1,500 worldwide. By mid-2001, more than 1,300 North American dailies had an online presence. The largest individual newspaper Web sites are nytimes.com (8.28 million unique visitors in October 2001), usatoday.com (5.65 m), washingtonpost.com (4.91 m), LATimes.com (2.77 m), and The Boston Globe’s boston.com (1.87 m). The top consolidated newspaper sites are Gannett’s sites, New York Times Digital, Tribune Interactive, E.W. Scripps, Knight Ridder’s Real Cities, Knight Ridder, and Gannett’s USA Today (CSFB 2001:26, 28).

      Gannett has 95 domestic Web sites, while Knight Ridder has 45 websites. Its operation, Knight Ridder Digital, joins Belo Online Inc., Times Co. Digital, and Tribune Interactive, as divisions separate from newspaper operations. Other companies have closer connections to the printed property (NAA Facts 2001:22; Sullivan 11/13/99:52; Veronis Suhler 2001:257).

      One industry analyst noted, “The US Internet daily newspaper market has grown rapidly from a scant $21 million in 1996 to $207 million by the end of 1998” (Brown 1999:54). With many different types of media concerns establishing classified Web sites, and with low barriers to enter, newspaper companies’ ventures into this business are part defensive and part evolutionary. Many digital newspapers have been losing money, but companies are willing to take losses to preserve their classified ad base, a $15–18 billion a year business making up 25–50 percent of total revenue. Over the last few years, newspaper companies have launched Internet-based publications and/or portals, or job search sites with employment advertising, either as extensions of their print-based newspapers or as stand-alone entities. Other sources of online revenues come from retail advertising, sponsorships, and listing fees. Given the fallout of strictly Internet concerns after April 2000, and careful investment strategies by newspaper companies, experts predict increasing profitability for online newspapers over the next few years. Overall, the Internet provides a major opportunity for newspaper publishers to use their information-gathering operations to create viable Internet companies in the future (Brown 1999:54; Chyi and Sylvie 1998; Lallande 5/01:8–9; Moses 1/15/ 01; Veronis Suhler 2001:259; Zollman 1999:7).

The Newspaper Guild’s Response to Online Newspapers

      The advent of the digital newspaper has created a host of new labor relations issues, including union recognition and jurisdiction, employee status, and ownership and compensation for reuse of work. This paper focuses on union recognition and jurisdiction.

      By focusing on how the product (information) is produced, not delivered, the 32,000–member Newspaper Guild has developed a number of strategies to bring online newspaper workers into the union fold. Preliminary evidence shows they are making some headway, but significant obstacles remain. The digital newspaper will also impact nonjournalist Guild members, including advertising workers concerned with commissions, combination (Internet and print) sales, or additional duties for classified workers (Needham 1998).

      In 1999 the Guild had approximately 20 agreements covering online workers, all where the Guild had prior representation rights (Rudder 1999:61). The union has employed a number of tactics to achieve representation rights for online workers. These include extending the existing jurisdiction clause, negotiating new provisions, labor board proceedings, and litigating (Fitzgerald 9/12/98; Needham 1998). Below are examples of these strategies.

Guild Strategies for Claiming Jurisdiction

      Some locals have written strong jurisdiction clauses that make it easy for them to argue that the development of editorial copy and advertising for electronic publications is similar to the unit’s traditional work, and that jurisdiction should be extended to the new products. Examples include contracts at the Toledo Blade, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Denver Post, and The Rocky Mountain News. In these cases, the number of online employees is small, and employers did not resist. At The Register-Guard (Eugene, OR) and The Knoxville News-Sentinel, the Guild has used recognition clauses that identify only job classifications and departments covered by an agreement to cover workers doing online work.

      Guild units also have negotiated modified jurisdiction language to incorporate work related to technological advances, including online publications. Some were the result of negotiations for a successor agreement; some resulted from grievance and arbitration settlements. Examples of jurisdictional clauses modified to incorporate technological advances include the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune, the Montreal Gazette, and the San Francisco Chronicle (Needham 1998). Recently, on February 16, 2001, after a dispute that lasted several years, the Northern California Media Workers Guild and SF Gate, a website operated as a separate enterprise from the San Francisco Chronicle, signed a 4-year memorandum that accretes nearly three dozen editorial and advertising employees to the existing bargaining unit at the Chronicle.

      The agreement extends much of the main contract to these employees but amends some sections to give management flexibility. For example, jurisdiction over work performed for the Gate is not exclusive and may be performed by Guild-represented employees or by persons employed by the Gate (Labor & Employment Law Letter September/October 2001:100).

      A number of locals have drafted supplemental language to enable its members to perform online work that is similar to the work performed by the existing unit. Examples include the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the (Akron) Beacon Journal, which includes not just newsroom employees but also the maintenance department (Needham 1998). In September 2000, the Guild unit at the Beacon Journal ratified a new 3-year deal that maintains the unit’s jurisdiction over online work in the wake of a corporate realignment that spun off Ohio.com from the Beacon Journal. The contract bars publication in the print newspaper of editorial content produced for online ventures by non- Beacon Journal employees. It also creates a new job classification of e-journalist, whose duties include reporting, writing, and copyediting (The Guild Reporter 9/15/00:5).

      Given the uncertainties and risks related to online publishing, some publishers have taken both cautious and hostile approaches to union jurisdiction. In some cases, as at the Portland Press Herald (Maine) and the San Jose Mercury News, publishers have agreed to experimental and temporary clauses that extend jurisdiction to the Guild for a fixed period of time (Needham 1998). At The Pueblo Chieftain, a dispute arose in 1996 following the company’s creation of the Pueblo Chieftain Online. The workers in question were HTML coders who, the company argued, were part of a separate venture and not part of the bargaining unit. An arbitrator ruled in August 1998 that these workers did “soft coding,”¹ work similar to the tasks they performed as paginators who code text when laying out newspaper pages. As such, the arbitrator directed the company to include online workers in the extant Guild unit (The Guild Reporter 8/21/98:8). At The Providence Journal and The (Baltimore) Sun, where negotiations and grievance and arbitration hearings have failed to produce settlements, the parties have used the NLRB and the courts to resolve jurisdictional disputes.

      The dispute at The Providence Journal began in the summer of 1994, after the company established a dial-in online service initially called Rhode Island Horizons. Soon after the company moved the operations to the World Wide Web and changed the name to projo.com. The union claimed representation rights, but the company argued that the online jobs were different from those of the print version and, thus, fell outside of the union’s control. In response to failed negotiations, the union filed a grievance in May 1995, eventually taking the case to the full NLRB in Washington.

      In a case watched closely by the union and newspaper companies, the Providence newspaper reversed course and settled with the union short of a Board ruling, allowing seven editorial and two advertising workers to fall under the Guild’s contract. The company attributed its reversal to the rapid growth of the Internet and the need to have both papers and employees housed in the same building to maximize efficiencies in news and advertising (Noack 8/8/98:9).²

      One of the most contentious cases to date arose in the summer of 1996 at The (Baltimore) Sun following the conclusion of a contract with the Washington–Baltimore Guild. The agreement failed to include language dealing with online and events promotion employees at the SunSpot, an online venture that had not yet been launched. The union filed a unit clarification petition in August and, after the Sunspot commenced operations in September, a separate one seeking jurisdiction over the Ad/Marketing Department in October. At the end of 1996 the NLRB’s Regional Director consolidated both cases. The Guild argued that the work performed by online workers was similar to that done at the Sun, while the company argued that the union failed to file the petition in a timely manner.

      In December 1997, almost 1 year after the union’s petition, the Regional Director ruled for the union, arguing that both sets of workers shared a “community of interest” strong enough to accrete Sunspot employees to the larger unit. The Guild also won the right to represent workers in the Promotions and Events Department. At the time, the union represented reporters, advertising staff, and maintenance workers at the Sun. The Times-Mirror Company, then owner of the properties, filed an appeal to the full Board on January 15, 1998 (Noack 2/3/98).

      On April 7, 2000, a three-member panel of the Board ruled that The Sun violated the Act by refusing to bargain with the Washington–Baltimore Newspaper Guild for employees working at Sunspot following their accretion to the unit in the 1997 unit clarification decision (L&ELL 6/2000:102). But, in July 2001, the US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled that the Board erred in ordering the company to add employees in its Web Site Department to an established bargaining unit. The lead judge called an order of accretion “an order of last resort, a drastic remedy of exceptional cases.” To determine whether the Web workers should be accreted to the larger unit, the justices applied the two-prong test set out in Safeway Stores [256 NLRB 918, 107 LRRM 1338 (1981)]. Under Safeway, the Board may issue an order to accrete employees into an existing bargaining unit when the employees have “little or no separate identity and thus cannot be considered to be a separate appropriate unit,” and the community of interest between the employees and the existing unit is “overwhelming.” In this case, the court contended that the Web employees were different from newsroom employees because they did not work on preparing the newspaper, they were paid differently from other employees, and they needed a set of skills and expertise different from traditional newspaper workers. Moreover, the justices found that the web-based workers shared little community of interest with Sun employees (BNA 7/20/01:A-12).

      One outstanding case that may determine labor relations and union strategies for Web work involves Knight Ridder. The Guild has filed four separate unfair labor practice charges against Knight Ridder.com after Knight Ridder moved its papers’ Web operations to a separate corporate subsidiary in San Jose, the parent organization’s new home. Unionized Web workers at four newspapers were transferred to the new subsidiary. Knight Ridder argues that those employees no longer work for the papers in Philadelphia, San Jose, Duluth, and St. Paul. It also contends that the work performed by Knight Ridder.com is substantially different from the work performed by employees at the individual newspapers when they were involved in Internet operations. The Guild argues that the company does not have the right to remove these workers from their respective bargaining units without negotiating with the union (Moses 12/11/00; Wenner 2001).

      Organizing Web workers in the wake of the 2001 Sunspot ruling and when companies make strategic decisions to create separate subsidiaries apart from the print newspaper will be very challenging for the Guild. Other organizing obstacles include the dynamism of the industry and the Web itself, employer resistance, layoffs, and the limited numbers of employees hired to produce online newspapers. These could make the cost-benefit calculations unfavorable for the Guild. However, the legal landscape is still in flux, giving hope to the unions that intend to unite web-based employees with their print version colleagues. Moreover, since newsprint accounts for 15–25 percent (at higher circulation papers) of total operating costs, and much of the cost of running circulation departments (roughly 10–20 percent of operating expenses) is tied up in the distribution network, publishers may devote more resources to the electronic delivery of news (Morton 2001:68). If they do, the Guild must have a significant presence at both print and web-based properties or they and the other newspaper unions will become anachronistic.

The Future of Newspaper Unionism

      The main factors that have contributed to union weakness since the mid-1970s--rapidly advancing technology, industry consolidation and concentration and the prominence and power of publicly traded media companies, and certain public policies--are not expected to be reversed anytime soon. For unions to regain power in this tough environment, they must embark on large-scale organizing drives, merge related international unions, consolidate and centralize bargaining units, and work to reverse adverse public policies. These are all extremely challenging tasks for unions to achieve at present (see Stanger 2002, for more details).

      Above all, it is the future of the newspaper itself that could determine the fate of newspaper unions. Since the 1970s, newspaper companies have gained control of the labor process by implementing new production technologies, then by rationalizing the distribution process, hurting newspaper unions in the process. Until the digital supplants the print version, the power base of the newspaper unions will lie with the drivers, since they have the best chance of preventing the distribution of newspapers during strikes. Should the digital newspaper predominate, the production of the newspaper once again will become contested terrain for workplace control. While this may be years away, the Guild’s ability to organize online (and print) workers is essential to union survival in the industry.

Endnotes

1. Soft coders use a computer program to convert stored data, including text and graphics, into HTML code. Hard coders write HTML code directly from a keyboard into a computer.

2. An emerging trend in Internet operations is for companies to consolidate their operations across the country into a single operation that may eventually be spun off into a separate public company. Some newspapers are partnering with others in close geographic proximity to share a Web site and also are entering joint ventures with traditional Internet concerns (Morton 10/99:100).

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