Union Never?

When the Hearst Corporation shut down the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer‘s print edition, negotiating individual deals
with about 20 of the P-I‘s 170 employees to produce an
online-only P-I, there was a lot of grumbling about union
busting.

After all, take away the nostalgia and emotion that surrounded the
death of this city’s oldest daily newspaper, and what you had was a
large business with a unionized workforce suddenly becoming a much
smaller business with a nonunion workforce. Hearst didn’t even have to
recruit a whole new staff to accomplish this. All it had to do was
announce mass P-I layoffs and offer to hire a small percentage
of the
P-I‘s journalists back for a new online-only entity,
and the combination of a deep recession and tremendous anxiety about
the future of newspapers took care of the rest. According to accounts
from P-I staffers, many took significant benefit and pay
cuts—in addition to dropping out of the union—in order to
secure their new jobs at seattlepi.com.

Part of what lefty Seattle liked about the old P-I was that
it was a union shop, walking the labor-friendly talk of its editorial
writers. Now it’s just another business, leveraging economic anxiety
against reporters’ sense that their increasingly demanding jobs deserve
good compensation. One Seattle Times journalist, seeing that
Congressman Jim
McDermott was contributing to the new online-only
P-I, remarked in an e-mail: “So how do supposed liberals like
McDermott… justify contributing to a ‘paper’ that just shitcanned the
union and hired back people at substandard wages and benefits? I am
surprised no one has brought that up in this supposedly union
town.”

Similarly, former P-I reporter Debera Harrell, speaking to
the Columbia Journalism Review on March 17, the day after Hearst
announced the print P-I‘s closure, said: “A huge truth is that
online journalism is being deployed to break unions—and I say
this on behalf of my many highly educated, talented colleagues who are
now without jobs because of this unfortunate trend. The corporate
bottom line has trumped public service.”

Well, has it? Michelle Nicolosi, executive producer for the new
online-only P-I, didn’t return a call to discuss the venture’s
stance on union membership. Neither did Hearst spokesman Paul
Luthringer. And Liz Brown, administrator for the Pacific Northwest
Newspaper Guild, the union that represented P-I employees back
when the P-I was also a newspaper, would only answer questions
over e-mail—and she wouldn’t answer all of them.

“We do have an agreement with Hearst that it will recognize the
guild as the collective bargaining agent for the people from our
membership that it hired for seattlepi.com,” Brown wrote. “And we have
an opportunity to bargain for what I hope will be a groundbreaking new
contract. It will not look like our old P-I contract.”

Brown would not elaborate on the agreement, nor would she say how
many former guild members are now at the new P-I. Nor would she
reveal whether any of them even want to be in the union again.
Which suggests that this could be a daunting organizing challenge for
the guild. A significant number of the current seattlepi.com employees were never
represented by the guild in the past—with the most well-known
case being blogger Monica Guzman, whose hiring as a union-exempt “new
media” employee in 2007 triggered an unsuccessful lawsuit by the guild.
It’s unclear whether these employees, who were willing to work for
Hearst without union representation before, will want to be in a union
now. Even Joel Connelly, the resolutely pro-labor columnist, said he
was “torn” about the idea of unionizing seattlepi.com—though he has made it
clear that he had to give up a huge potential severance payment from
Hearst and take benefit cuts in order to join the venture.

To at least one seattlepi.com employee, the idea of unionizing is simply too much of a distraction at
the moment—a moment that, for the site’s employees, is a bit like
the frenzied launch of a start-up. “I just haven’t given it enough
serious thought to know what I’d do or what I’d want,” this person
said, adding: “I feel my salary is just fine.”

For her part, Brown doesn’t seem to expect a lot of support from
Hearst as the guild tries to unionize the new P-I workforce. “I
don’t think the attitude of most employers toward unions has changed or
is going to change any time soon,” she said.