Strike: The Daily News War and the Future of American Labor. - book reviews

National Review, Oct 24, 1994 by Guy Hawtin

Only a New Yorker would be so presumptuous as to analyze a strike at a Big Apple tabloid with a view to obtaining insights into the future of American organized labor. New York is by no means a typical American city; its newspaper publishers are by no means typical American employers; and its newspaper craft unions are by no means typical American trade unions.

Irritating though it is for a non-New Yorker to admit, Richard Vigilante - formerly a columnist for New York Newsday and a resident of Queens, recently made executive editor of Regnery Publishing in Washington - has pulled it off with his absorbing and perceptive analysis of the strike that shut down the New York Daily News from October 24, 1990, to March 20, 1991. His account of this quintessentially New York labor dispute not only catalogues the profound changes in skills and work habits that microchips and robotics are demanding of industrial workers throughout the nation, but it also defines the challenge that rapidly evolving technology presents to American organized labor.

His description of the totally automated, computer-controlled workplace of the "post-industrial renaissance" is a vision of machinery almost as intelligent as the men who operate it; machines that hum rather than clatter; machines so infinitely flexible they must be perpetually watched, listened to, and psychoanalyzed because the capacity to improve their performance is virtually limitless.

"Post-industrial" technology values mental agility far above manual dexterity and, thus, requires flexible work practices quite alien to those ponderously negotiated with union representatives at the traditional bargaining table. Clearly, this is an unappealing prospect for industrial labor unions geared primarily to negotiating contracts that effectively determine wages by means of work rules regulating the quantity and quality of output.

As Mr. Vigilante puts it: "The new technology requires ... workers ... to accept a completely new way of thinking not only about their jobs, but also about the institutions and managers they work for and their unions, if any. They must become willing and eager members of a team devoted to exploring the potential of the machines. The challenge can be severe and painful."

In the mid 1980s, the newspaper craft unions got an inkling of just how severe and painful that challenge could be, when the Tribune Company employed the new technology to transform the fortunes of its failing flagship, the Chicago Tribune. The results were spectacular. Profits soared from 6 to 8 per cent on operating costs in the late 1970s to a thumping 20 to 25 per cent - making it one of the most profitable businesses in the country. The price was a strike that the management broke almost effortlessly. And, along with the strike, it broke the unions that called it.

Emboldened by glittering rewards in Chicago, the company's management decided to administer the same remedy to its New York property, the Daily News, a technological dinosaur which over a decade had managed to transmute $4 billion in revenue into a $100-million loss. All that stood in the way were the New York craft unions, cocooned from technological reality by labor contracts enshrining time-honored abuses such as featherbedding, over-manning, restrictive practices, and pay for unworked overtime. The craft unions, the managers confidently assured themselves, would either submit or go the way of their Chicago counterparts. Instead, the company was to discover that the Big Apple plays by a set of rules different from those that prevail in the rest of the country. In this case, the union won - albeit quite by accident.

Mr. Vigilante deals sympathetically with both management and unions - which is far better than either deserves. The management side seems to have been dominated largely by humorless prigs whose hamfisted ineptitude cost their shareholders millions upon millions of dollars. Not only did they misjudge the brutal determination of a significant number of the latter-day Luddites facing them across the negotiating table, they failed to grasp the political dimensions of strike-breaking in a city where some 40 per cent of the workforce are union members.

Events leading up to the strike call, its violent aftermath, and the unions' victory are researched and related in masterly fashion. Perhaps the most shocking revelation is that New York government officials, the police, and even the press turned a blind eye on a vicious terrorist campaign against the Daily News's management and forced the paper's sale to publishing tycoon and soon-to-be-unmasked embezzler Robert Maxwell. It is deeply disturbing that more than one thousand serious crimes of violence took place without a major outcry from the press or so much as a murmur from Governor Mario Cuomo or then-Mayor David Dinkins, both of whom were deeply indebted to organized labor.

As both the record of a strike and a treatise on the future of organized labor, this book makes compelling reading. Mr. Vigilante argues persuasively that the new technology is ending the thralldom in which unions have held much of U.S. industry for the best part of five decades. The proportion of unionized workers in the private sector has fallen from around the 30 per cent mark in the 1950s to 11.5 per cent in 1992, and the declining trend seems set to continue.