The Broken Table explains the incredible odds these striking workers faced. Although the National Labor Relations ruled in 1997 that the employer had engaged in unfair labor practices, federal judges undercut the independent agency and upheld the newspapers in 2000, forcing the unions to agree to contracts on management’s terms. “But employers announced that they would take back only a fraction of the striking workers, as new vacancies allowed.” Legal challenges, upon which the unions’ hopes of strike success hinged, failed to stick. “On February 14, 1997, after 19 months on strike, unions made an unconditional offer to return to work,” Rhomberg writes. Judges sided with employers, enjoining the union. When mass picketing at the plant threatened to block production, police responded with brutality. The newspapers aggressively hired permanent replacement scabs and spent an estimated $ 40 million spent on private security, the employers paid another $ 1 million to buy off the suburban Sterling Heights police force where the production plant was located. But the boycott didn’t force the employers to settle the massive national newspaper chains had deep enough pockets to ride out the strike.ĭespite widespread community support and internal solidarity, the companies had the upper hand. A vigorous local boycott caused circulation at the struck newspapers to drop precipitously, resulting in an estimated $ 100 million loss for the papers in the first six months of the strike. Strikers set up their own newspaper, The Detroit Sunday Journal, which in its first year had 300, 000 subscribers. Workers engaged in a wide variety of tactics to attempt to win.
They prepared for the strike for years, engaged in bargaining tactics calculated to provoke a strike, and put in place extensive contingency plans. “The strike was fundamentally not about traditional dollars and cents, but about the control of the workplace and the future of the bargaining relationship,” Rhomberg writes.īy his account, the newspapers were far better prepared for battle than the striking workers. As Rhomberg states, “Deliberately negotiating to impasse, unilaterally imposing conditions, and breaking strikes - all of these actions destroy the function of collective bargaining…” With lockouts and employer-provoked strikes on the rise, The Broken Table offers a timely message.įor those not familiar with the Detroit newspaper strike, Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press workers were forced out on strike in 1995 by a management team hell-bent on crushing the newspaper guild union. Rhomberg uses the newspaper strike to reveal all that is wrong with the modern system of collective bargaining and striking.Īs he writes in the introduction, his book “is addressed to all readers concerned about the future of workplace governance in the United States.” The title of the book refers to how employers have wrecked the collective bargaining table by locking out workers and triggering strikes. Be prepared: This is not a feel-good story. Yet sadly, the strike did not end in a union victory.Ĭhris Rhomberg, a sociology professor at Fordham University, chronicles the strike in the recently published The Broken Table: The Detroit Newspaper Strike and the State of American Labor. In a five-year battle, workers threw a wide array of tactics against the employer, including a very effective local boycott, a corporate campaign, and extensive unfair labor practice charges. For more details, see “Subscription Support” in the app’s settings for more details and customer service contact information.In the mid- 1990s, 2, 500 newspaper workers at the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press engaged in a heroic, high-profile strike against the Gannett and Knight-Ridder newspaper chains. Subscriptions are charged to your Google Play account at confirmation of purchase and automatically renew each month or year, unless turned off in your Google Play account settings at least 24 hours before the end of the current period.
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