ON THE PICKET LINE
Seattle newspaper strike
imminent
Over
900 Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild members, along with 180 Teamsters Local
763 members, voted Nov. 15 to strike against the Seattle Times and the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer. The Guild represents reporters, photographers, sales and
customer service representatives, composing room workers and others. The
Teamsters represent the mailers--the workers who assemble the newspaper
sections.
Delivery
drivers represented by Teamsters Local 174 and press operators represented by
Graphic Communications International Union Local 767-M have pledged to honor the
picket lines.
The
Post-Intelligencer is a Hearst Corporation paper. Knight-Ridder owns 49.5
percent of the Seattle Times and the Blethen family owns 50.5 percent. Both
papers are produced by the Seattle Times under a joint operation agreement.
The
Guild has set a strike deadline for 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 21. The date was chosen
to disrupt production of the Thanksgiving Day paper, the largest and most
profitable edition of the year. The deadline was announced Nov. 15 at a rally of
hundreds of Guild members, Teamsters and supporters. It was held across the
street from the Seattle Times' downtown headquarters.
The
Times responded by erecting a chain-link fence around that facility and the
suburban printing plant. Jack-booted security goons were brought in from Detroit
to guard the hallways and offices. Threatening letters have gone out to all the
workers.
Rather
than intimidating anyone, these measures are strengthening the workers' resolve.
A
strike headquarters has been set up in the Bricklayers Hall and pledges of
support and material aid are flowing in. A strike paper--to be called The Union
Record--is in the works. The original Union Record was a radical labor paper
published during the 1919 Seattle General Strike.
On
Nov. 18 the unions held picket-captain training conducted by Boeing engineers
and technical workers. Over 400 workers attended. The Boeing workers' union is
donating its phone bank and expertise. Boeing workers won a strike last spring
against the giant airplane and weapons builder.
The
newspaper workers have been without a contract since July 22. Workers at both
papers are demanding an end to the erosion of their wages and the two-tier pay
scale. Consumer prices have gone up 43.9 percent in the Seattle area over the
last 10 years. But the Guild contract minimum wage has gone up only 21 percent.
It's
not like the bosses are broke. The Blethen family recently bought a string of
newspapers in Maine for $212 million. They're paying off that investment in five
years rather than the 10 originally projected. A suburban printing plant was
also paid off ahead of schedule. The downtown Seattle Times facility is
currently being remodeled into a Blethen showcase. Hearst, meanwhile, is
involved in a $700-million-plus takeover of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Both
papers are flush with cash. Their average annual take is 21 percent profits.
Newspaper workers are demanding to share in the wealth they create.
--
Charles (Kaz)
Suzat
Asst.
Chapel Chair
GCIU
767-M
Seattle
Times Chapel
Amazon.union?
Customer-service
workers at Amazon.com's Seattle headquarters have started a union drive with the
Communications Workers. They call themselves Day2@Amazon.com. The group is
working to gather support from a majority of the 400 customer-service
representatives with the goal of winning union recognition and a
collective-bargaining agreement. The union drive comes at the start of the
holiday shopping season--the on-line bookseller's most profitable time of
year.
In
other local labor news, Seattle-based United Airlines machinists are slowing
down holiday travel to demand justice from management. Graduate students and
teaching assistants at the University of Washington recently joined the Auto
Workers and passed a strike authorization vote. The university refuses to
recognize the union.
All
of this is taking place as the anniversary of last year's historic
demonstrations against the World Trade Organization approaches. Protesters plan
commemorative events on Nov. 30.
--Workers
World Seattle
bureau
New York
teachers rally
Raucous
and resolute, 20,000 New York teachers rallied outside City Hall Nov. 16 to
demand a new contract. The United Federation of Teachers, which represents
78,000 employees of the Board of Education, called the
rally.
The
Teachers' contract expired Nov. 15, but the city has refused to bargain with
them since early September. Two days before the rally, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
threatened UFT President Randi Weingarten with jail if she called a strike.
Public-employee strikes are illegal in New York state under the Taylor Law,
which mandates that every employee pay a fine of two days pay for every day on
strike.
Weingarten
said that while she has not ruled out any options, a strike is not under
consideration right
now.
The
union is demanding a 20-percent pay hike over two years. This would bring city
teachers, paraprofessionals and clerical staff up to the level of their suburban
counterparts. Teachers are also calling for reductions in class size that would
benefit both teachers and students. Class sizes in the city are about 20 percent
higher than in the
suburbs.
The
city will make its formal contract proposal at the end of November. Officials
claim they will offer a "generous" pay hike in return for the teachers working
an extra one-and-a-half hours per day, giving up tenure protection and agreeing
to a "merit pay" scheme.
The
union responded that the city's definition of "generous" was probably different
from the
members'.
Paddy
Colligan, a high-school librarian, asked, "How can the city and state pretend
they want to educate students when they keep on cutting our budget and driving
good teachers to the
suburbs?"
A
number of labor leaders and elected officials took the stage to support the
teachers. A speaker from the New York State United Teachers--a joint body of the
American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association--said the
group would support the Teachers' efforts to modify the Taylor Law. Weingarten
has called for the Taylor Law's penalties to be reduced in cases where employers
refuse to
bargain.
Barbara
Bowen is president of the Professional Staff Congress, which represents the
faculty and staff of the City University of New York. She said that education
for children of color, children of immigrants and the daughters and sons of the
working class is under attack. She pledged that the PSC would support the
Teachers in resisting this
attack.
--G.
Dunkel
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