Strike: The Daily News War and the Future of American Labor
By Richard Vigilante
Simon & Schuster, 319 pages, $23
Featherbedding, organized crime, a violent strike, corrupt union officials and a management that might well have been on another planet: just business as usual at the New York Daily News in 1990.
In the view of Richard Vigilante, former Reagan speechwriter, now a columnist for New York Newsday and part of a new think tank called the Center for Social Thought, the 1990-91 strike of the Daily News-founded 75 years ago by Joseph Medill Patterson, one of two heirs to the Chicago Tribune-was at once inevitable and preventable.
Vigilante is determined to treat the strike as a symbol of the deterioration of organized labor, and I think he is off target in that respect. But he does offer a well-organized analysis of how escalating labor-management tensions sparked a strike that, in its first two months, cost Tribune Company, then owner of the Daily News, more than $100 million. Tribune Company finally bailed out in March 1991-paying the highly leveraged Robert Maxwell some $60 million to take the Daily News off its hands.
Early on in the process, Vigilante writes, “(Daily) News executives tended to regard the union guys’ emotionalism . . , their lavishly delayed anger and hurt feelings, and their constant laments that Tribune Company did not care about them and wanted to be rid of them, as not only beside the point but affected. . . . To management the union guys seemed not only as tough as the managers themselves, but almost brutes. . . . These were the same men . . . who would shut down a pressroom if management attempted to discipline even the most flagrant malingerers; men who took bribes to sell their fellow workers’ jobs, or who were lifelong Mafia fellow travelers; men who seemed perfectly content to let the News die. . . .
“(But for) all the hell they put the company through . . . the union guys never thought of the company as alien or themselves as its enemies. They were the company. And if the company was a family there was no doubt as to who were the parents and who the children. . . . It is bosses, like parents, who come up with the money. Children depend on parents, but they also rebel against them. This is natural. But parents who abandon their children because they act like children are fiendish and unnatural.
“The company’s cold, unnatural vices seemed to excuse the unions from self-examination or restraint. Prissy righteousness on one side and rage on the other soon overcame rational judgement, and it was rage, offended piety, and the conviction that they were facing an enemy beyond human decency that would finally be the union’s most powerful weapon.
“In this happy state of mind, the two sides finally entered negotiations.”
For people interested in newspaper history and in the dynamics of the changing struggles of workers and owners, “Strike” is a worthy book. In many ways, it is a collective bargaining version of “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.” Vigilante has done solid research, which he carefully documents, and he generally moves the story along at a pace that matches the frenetic developments that overtook all the players. He marches the reader to the inevitable climax of angry workers walking off the job and to an apparently unchecked level of intimidation and violence against the News’ distributors and replacement labor.
One naturally wonders what Tribune Company officers and Jim Hoge, the former Daily News publisher now peacefully ensconced in the editor’s suite at Foreign Affairs magazine, must think of Vigilante’s story line, which strongly suggests that both management and union leadership abdicated their responsibilities and gave way to a “hired gun” mentality. Surely they could not agree with the author’s contention that the News’ unions “won” the strike-everyone lost, and in the quick handoff from Maxwell to Mortimer Zuckerman the Daily News became an even weaker workplace in an even shakier newspaper market.
What Vigilante doesn’t examine is why Tribune Company thought that the New York market could sustain four daily papers-the Daily News, the Times, the Post and New York Newsday-in the metropolitan area. Especially when three of the four are still struggling financially, it is worth wondering why Tribune Company thought it could make a success of the Daily News in the 1990s.
And, contrary to Vigilante’s view in this book, it isn’t always a work stoppage that destroys a newspaper; it could well be the severe decline nationally in newspaper readership. One example resides in Dallas: When the Times-Herald folded in 1991 for lack of a buyer, it left 900 people jobless and the city with one remaining paper, the Morning News. Whether the Post and Daily News survive in New York-and whether the Manhattan edition of the L.A. Times-owned Newsday becomes truly profitable-are questions that go beyond the realm of labor-management relations.
Given that broader context, it is the final two chapters of “Strike” that take Vigilante off course, into neo-conservative musings about the future of labor unions. Frankly, the subtitle to this book flirts with false advertising. This is really an intriguing tale of how a longstanding conflict between, for the most part, management and the News’ mailers and drivers led to a strike whose violent nature, as Vigilante correctly says, the New York media, the police and the city’s political and opinion leaders responded to in a manner that was passive at best.
“Strike” does not build any case for labor’s future, except to suggest that “company unions” could be a salvation. It would be more instructive to refer to some of Vigilante’s 1993 writings in the National Review, in which he asserts that the collapse of labor unions could be the impetus to restore a blue-collar middle class that would feature one primary breadwinner and a return to “traditional” family life.
“Strike” is worth reading for its insightful treatment of how an impasse and strike occurred in a labor market that many would consider an anomaly, and how the skewed perceptions of management and labor shaped that conflict’s outcome. Indeed, the story Vigilante tells leads one to think about various aspects of this country’s relatively short (60-year) history of collective bargaining legislation.
Will Congress ever approve a law banning the hiring of permanent replacement workers for strikers-a step that some union loyalists favor but one that Vigilante says would be a “counsel of despair” for unions because “it in effect admits that they cannot change”?
Closer to home, one wonders about the future of labor-management relations in downstate Illinois, where Caterpillar and the UAW continue to thump on their ideological breasts. How are such disputes different from the incredible bloodletting at what was once the nation’s third-largest newspaper?
In his treatment of the decline of the Daily News, Vigilante urges us to look ahead and ponder the future of labor-management relations in the post-industrial Information Age. But “Strike” is really the story of a stubborn, foolish and tragic dispute; it really doesn’t need a proselytizing message as epilogue.
