Date: Tue, 7 Jan 1997 22:07:31 -0800
Subject: M-G: Re: Detroit newspaper strike




On Tue, 7 Jan 1997, Paul Zarembka <zarembka-AT-acsu.buffalo.edu> wrote:

>Is there any chance that the Detroit strikers could move beyond putting
>out a weekly Tabloid Sunday Edition of the paper to a full-blown paper and
>just take over a big chunk of the newpaper circulation in Detroit?
>
>Paul


Well of course that would have been an ideal situation.  The strikers
are some of the finest and most capable persons with the skill and
the hands to put out a much better paper than the scab ones.  They
would have attracted the advertising needed from local business and
people would have bought and subscribed to it without question.
Detroit is a union town and no one would have had anything to do
with a scab paper.  Everyone I know has canceled their subscriptions
to them.  But it is hard to go for 18 months without a daily paper,
if you haven't had to do it lately, take my word for it.  The weekly
has a ferociously loyal readership, but it is just a 36-page tabloid,
with the TV guide and sports, there's precious little room for much.
Detroit is not like a lot of other big cities, few places here have
papers from other areas, and USA Today is owned by the same company
as the scab papers, Knight-Ridder.
I have asked long ago what was going on with efforts toward putting
out a daily edition and the answer was that they have looked 
everywhere in the area and in Ohio for a print facility that could
handle putting out a daily, and none could be found.  Hard to believe?
I thought so but I got a short-course in newspaper publishing and it 
is a huge undertaking and an operation large enough to take on a new
job like a daily for a major metropolitan area doesn't just be sitting 
around unused and waiting.  Trucks can be rented or leased, offices 
too, etc., but you just can't take your masters to Kinko's and have them
run off a quarter million newspapers every day.  It was difficult for 
the strikers even finding a press to print the weekly.  Another local 
weekly paper lets them use their presses to put it out.

Workers here know what is going on here with this strike.  One and
all agree that the management is only about busting up the union.
They are losing millions every day and can continue to do so for
however long it takes to break the union apparently.

Unfortunately the union bureaucracy has not helped either in some
people's opinion.  The scab papers make their biggest bucks on 
advertising in their Sunday editions, and the strikers were making
an effort to stop those editions from getting out.  Support was
building each week, until on Labor Day weekend in '95 thousands
of workers came out to the picket lines at the Sterling Heights plant,
and it was a night of heated battle with hundreds of cops from 
surrounding areas trying to force back the people so that the scab
paper could get out of the plant.  People viewing the scene on TV 
saw the police being beat back and fleeing with fear in their faces
and the trucks full of scab papers being flipped over and otherwise
destroyed.  The company brought in a helicopter to airlift the paper out.  

Things were getting too big and violent now, and the newspaper
strike was the topic of the day and becoming a popular mass
movement.  The authorities  (the court) stepped in to try to put the
brakes on this here.  They said that if the picketing continued
to be violent or the strikers obstructed the paper getting out
again, the union would have to pay a major fine whether they
called for the action or not.  This gave the bureaucrats the excuse
they needed to stop the popular actions, which they were not
pleased with either.  They forbade any more militant actions at
the Sterling Heights plant and effectively slit the throat of
what was becoming a very wonderful demonstration of the proletariat
pulling together and becoming very militant.   Things have gone
downhill since then.  And legal experts said that it was bullshit,
the union would never had to pay any fines, and no union ever had
to pay any fines under such a ruling.

In my opinion, if there is to be a national march and/or demonstration
here this summer in support of the newspaper strikers, it will 
have to be organized by the workers and their supporters without the
help of big-shot union officials whose sole reason for getting
involved in anything seems to be so that they can choke the life 
out of it.

Jay Miles / Detroit




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