The Teamsters contracts also contain open shop clauses, meaning that new-hires do not have to join the union or pay dues. Workers will get a mere 2 percent annual pay raise plus a $1,000 bonus if circulation increases by more than 100,000 copies. Mailers now earn around $11 an hour, compared to $16 before the strike. Pay cuts instituted during the strike will remain in place. Local 2040, which covered 800 mailroom workers in 1995, now has only 350 employees within its jurisdiction. The workforce covered by Local 372, the bargaining agent for delivery drivers, has been reduced to 750, down from 1,125 when the strike began. The contracts for Teamsters Locals 3, the largest bargaining units and the last to ratify, contain deep pay cuts and major changes in work rules that give management virtually a free hand to do whatever it wants. The agreements go far beyond the concessions originally demanded by management, imposing pay scales and work rules that not long ago would have been considered “non-union.” The unions have also abandoned hundreds of workers who are still displaced or blacklisted. A few days later the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions announced an end to its readership and advertising boycott of the News and Free Press. On December 17 the last of six union locals ratified an agreement sanctioning huge wage and job cuts. The union leadership called off the walkout in February of 1997, after failing to mount an effective struggle against the strike-breaking operation mounted by the News and the Free Press and their respective parent companies, Gannett and Knight-Ridder.įor the past several years the Teamsters and the AFL-CIO have been seeking to work out a formula that would allow the unions to resume their status as bargaining agents at the newspapers. The newspaper workers went on strike in July of 1995. Last month the Teamsters and allied AFL-CIO unions formally ended their five-and-one-half-year dispute with the Detroit News and Free Press on terms dictated by management.
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