Big Victory for Gary Guild as Prison Looms for Former Bosses

The last contract at the Gary (Ind.) Newspaper Guild came after five bitter years at the bargaining table and was a major disappointment, resulting in a merit-based system of pay raises and other losses.

This time around, in what Guild leaders hail as an historical bargaining comeback, the union fought back and won.

"We started out last January, and we said, 'We're going to do this in a year. We're not going to drag this out, and we're not going to let them impose the rules on us anymore,'" TNG-CWA Local 34014 President Lori Caldwell said.

The 58 Guild members in the newsroom at the Post Tribune, which covers northwest Indiana, wore shirts and buttons of solidarity and held informational pickets. But perhaps their most effective strategy was e-mailing the new president of their newspaper chain, the Hollinger Sun-Times Group. "We bombarded John Cruickshank with e-mails for months," Caldwell said.

Cruickshank replaced a strident anti-union executive, David Radler, who, with former Hollinger International CEO Conrad Black, has been the target of a vast federal fraud investigation. Radler has pleaded guilty to one count of fraud and is cooperating in the case against Black.

While Radler was running the Sun-Times group he pushed the Post Tribune publisher to fight the union every step of the way, trying to "strip us down to nothing," Caldwell said. The publisher even hired union-busting lawyer Michael Zinser, who has tried to break newspaper locals across the country.

But with Radler gone and the Post Tribune publisher promoted to a corporate position, a new attitude prevailed in bargaining. TNG-CWA Representative Bruce Nelson called it a "sea change" that appears to have trickled down from Cruickshank. "They became more employee-oriented," he said. "They didn't give the store away, but in terms of indicating that they want to treat workers with respect, they seemed to do that."

The tentative four-year contract, which members will vote on Feb. 26, is retroactive to the April 2005 expiration of the last pact. It ends the merit pay system and instead will give workers 2 percent raises each year. The union also won back a night differential, will get a company 401(k) contribution and will have an automatic dues deduction starting next year.

"In my experience, it was the biggest comeback I've seen," Nelson said. "Normally when you get beaten up that badly, it's very difficult to get things back."