The Enquirer's glowing tribute to Labor Day was composed by one or more editorial writers at its downtown offices. After being edited and laid out on the page, the article made its way electronically to the paper's printing facility at Western Avenue and Liberty Street in Queensgate.

There the paean to skilled laborers and the American dream was burned onto a thin metal plate, which, after being married up with dozens of other plates, was placed into position on huge printing presses for a two-day run that would produce the hefty Sunday paper.

And as the first good copy rolled off the presses and the men who run the machinery grabbed random pages to check color registration and ink density, perhaps one of them might have stumbled onto the paper's warning against runaway corporate greed. Then he might have smiled.

The men who run the presses on Western Avenue know firsthand about hard work, talent, rewards and runaway greed. So do the people who run The Cincinnati Enquirer and its parent company, Gannett Co.

The pressmen's union has been working without a contract for six months, which union officials say is a direct result of The Enquirer's refusal to negotiate in good faith. The pressmen are looking to extend their current contract word-for-word, with pay increases matched to inflation -- the same type of deal the paper apparently agreed to this year with two other unions -- but are being asked to give overtime wage concessions.

Meanwhile, in July, Gannett -- the country's largest newspaper chain -- announced record earnings per share. Second quarter net income increased 10 percent to $244 million.

The ultimate bargaining chip, a strike, is truly a last resort for the local union. When the pressmen's union in Detroit joined in calling a strike against Gannett's Detroit News and Knight-Ridder's Detroit Free Press, the companies simply fired everyone and hired replacement workers.

Talks go nowhere fast
One hundred or so pressmen work in two shifts at Western Avenue 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year to put out The Enquirer, The Cincinnati Post and a staggering number of advertising supplements and circulars. It's loud, often dirty work, but many of them have been pressmen for 30 or more years -- back when The Enquirer was printed in the basement of 617 Vine St. and The Post in the old Times-Star building on Broadway.

Average salary for a pressman at Western Avenue is $27,000 to $30,000. With overtime pay, some can make $50,000 a year.

Under terms of a joint operating agreement (JOA) signed in 1979, The Enquirer is responsible for all printing, advertising sales and marketing functions for both of the city's daily papers. Everyone at Western Avenue -- page layout artists, photo engravers, pressmen, mailroom workers and truck loaders -- works for The Enquirer. And most of them are represented by unions.

The contract under which the pressmen currently work expired on Feb. 28. Their union, Graphic Communications International Union (GCIU) Local 20N, has been bargaining with The Enquirer since December 1998 for a contract renewal.

The union proposes renewing the existing contract, from first page to last, says Local 20N President Robert J. Bryan, with the same economic adjustments the paper has agreed to with other Western Avenue unions. The Enquirer has rejected the proposal.

"They want us to agree to being paid less for overtime work and to hand off some of our overtime work to others," Bryan says. "Deciding how much overtime we work is the only control we have left. Business is so good for Gannett. How much more money do they want?"

Maureen Donahue, vice president of labor relations for The Enquirer, could not be reached for comment.

Bryan points out that two other unions at the printing plant -- GCIU Local 508, representing the photo engravers, and Teamsters Local 1717, representing mailroom staff -- were able to get The Enquirer to agree to contracts in 1999 that included economic adjustments. He wonders why the paper won't settle with the pressmen.

His answer might lie in hard feelings that stem from a lawsuit The Enquirer filed against Local 20N over an alleged work slowdown on July 4, 1998. The suit alleges that pressmen, upset over working on the holiday, purposefully worked slower that day, causing an unnecessary amount of overtime pay to be paid.

Bryan calls the claims ridiculous.

"My people have worked seven days a week and every holiday for years and years," he says. "The idea that they would suddenly complain about the Fourth of July is absurd. The paper had six managers on duty that day at the plant, and none of them verbally warned any pressman. No manager said anything to their superiors at the time about a slowdown."

Bryan says the suit's "trumped up charges" were manufactured by Enquirer management to throw a monkey wrench into contract talks and to bleed the local union's treasury.

"They've tied the suit in with contract negotiations to create turmoil and create a diversion," he says. "They've done this to weaken our local and, ultimately, to destroy it."

Local 20N has spent about $11,000 so far on legal fees to defend the work slowdown suit, Bryan says. About $4,000 of that has been contributed by the International GCIU, and the rest has come from the local itself.

"Remember, we're a group of 100 people," he says. "And we're fighting the largest newspaper conglomerate in the country."

The lawsuit is pending in federal court. Bryan says he was recently informed that Gannett officials would come to town on Oct. 26 to pick up negotiations on settling the suit.

Another bone of contention between the union and The Enquirer is a list of complaints Bryan has presented regarding worker safety concerns at Western Avenue. The presses are more than 20 years old and, he says, are run night and day without proper maintenance and occasionally with safety devices turned off.

A grievance Bryan filed against The Enquirer on May 25 says the paper violated its contract with Local 20N by not providing a clean, safe place to work and by disregarding machinery manufacturers' recommendations for operating the presses safely. The grievance cites four specific examples from April and May in which equipment safety devices were disabled and a broken light fixture was not replaced.

After deadlocking over the grievance, union and Enquirer officials agreed to binding arbitration. A hearing on the matter is scheduled for Oct. 28.

"We've lived with a lot of things at the plant," Bryan says, "but we can't live with the company's regard only for the quantity and quality of the products and no regard for our safety."

The arbitrator has authority to issue binding decisions, Bryan says. A victory for the pressmen could involve compensation to the workers, he says, but even if it doesn't, it would serve notice to The Enquirer that the union is mindful of safety problems at the plant.

Whether an arbitration win would be helpful in furthering contract negotiations is unknown, Bryan says. He's not sure what will cause The Enquirer to come to terms with his group.

Local 20N, he says, could suffer the same fate as two other unions at The Enquirer -- the Newspaper Guild, which disappeared after more than 12 years of fruitless negotiations, and the Communications Workers of America, which has operated without a contract since 1984.

Across the country, the Newspaper Guild represents newsroom staffs, from reporters to copy editors to photographers. Bryan was among union officials who helped organize Guild representation at The Enquirer in 1984. For years the Guild negotiated with the paper and Gannett to secure a contract for newsroom employees but ultimately was unsuccessful.

After surviving a decertification vote in 1996, the Enquirer Guild organization finally was decertified by its members in 1997.

The Post, owned by Scripps Howard, has had a Newspaper Guild local in its newsroom since 1933.

"Only one or two Gannett papers (out of 74 dailies) have newsroom contracts, so that should tell you something," says John C.K. Fisher, a Post reporter who serves as president of Guild Local 9. "Scripps seems to do better, with a higher percentage of its papers having Guild representation."

If the pressmen's union can't hammer out an agreement, Bryan says, its days might be numbered as well. He admits he doesn't have a lot of options and that The Enquirer holds most of the cards in the current negotiation stalemate.

Local 20N can ask for cease-and-desist orders from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) if the board finds that the paper has been negotiating in bad faith. But Bryan says that NLRB orders are little more than "a slap on the wrist."

The local can invoke a ban on overtime at Western Avenue, which he says would definitely hurt the plant's ability to keep up with growing demand for print jobs.

And the local could call a strike. After asking the International GCIU for permission for strike sanction against The Enquirer, Bryan received a letter from the national secretary-treasurer on June 16 approving his request -- though a final decision to strike must be approved by the union's national president.

Knowing what happened to another GCIU local in Detroit, Bryan is mindful of Gannett's history of hiring replacement press workers. So are Enquirer officials.

"They want us to strike," Bryan says. "They've basically told me to go for it. They'd have pressmen from other Gannett plants here before we knew it."

Detroit: Rock city
That's basically what happened in Detroit in 1995.

On July 13 of that year, six unions struck against Detroit Newspapers (DN), the joint operating agency formed by Detroit News and Detroit Free Press. DN had unilaterally imposed new wage terms and work conditions on the unions when their contracts expired that spring and then declined to bargain when the city's mayor tried to mediate a resolution to the dispute.

Union workers in the printing plant and in the newsrooms were terminated and replaced. In November, striking workers started publishing their own newspaper, The Detroit Sunday Journal. The unions banded together to form the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions and negotiate on a unified front with DN.

In February 1997, the unions made an unconditional offer to return to work, ending the strike. DN announced that the papers would accept the offer but would place striking workers on a preferential hiring list, which union officials said amounted to a lockout.

Four years after the strike began, many of the workers in Detroit remain locked out of their jobs.

And in the those four years, the unions won almost every case they presented to the NLRB on the papers' unfair labor practices. The labor relations board consistently ruled in the unions' favor and sought injunctions to force the papers to rehire locked-out workers.

"We won every NLRB charge except one," says Jack Howe, president of GCIU Local 13N in Detroit. "But the papers just kept appealing the rulings and dragging out the proceedings. Most of our pressmen are finally back to work at DN, and the papers have tried to secure contracts, though not good ones, to offset some of the NLRB charges."

The strategy for dealing with the unions seems clear now in retrospect, Howe says -- DN fired striking workers, hired replacements, ignored the non-binding NLRB findings and tried to drag out negotiations as long as possible in order to weaken the unions.

"I remember early in the strike seeing a quote attributed to DN Chief Executive Officer Frank Vega," Howe says. "He said about the unions, 'You may win in the courts, but you'll be dead, retired or gone by then.' "

Detroit Newspapers, a joint operating agreement like here in Cincinnati, is structured a little differently than the Enquirer/ Post JOA. Both Gannett and Knight-Ridder participate in running DN, though Gannett holds three seats on the DN board to Knight-Ridder's two and therefore controls the joint business.

Howe's Local 13N also represents pressmen at nearby Gannett papers in Lansing, Mich., and Port Huron, Mich. Dealing with the corporation on worker contracts is a reality that Howe faces every day -- and one he can sympathize with Bryan about.

"Gannett is very difficult to work with," Howe says. "All they care about is the bottom line. More than the quality of their product, I'm afraid."

And, he says, Gannett likes to pit unions against each other within their newspaper properties. That's why the unified union council was so important in Detroit and why all six of the striking unions have survived.

"Gannett would have wanted to pick us off one by one," Howe says. "But we've stuck together through thick and thin, and I think that's made a huge difference."

Corporate greed the root of all evil?
Bryan and his Cincinnati pressmen's union, meanwhile, are pretty much on their own in their labor negotiations. It's a daunting task that the local president faces, but one he's determined to see through -- because he feels he's fighting a just cause.

"I know that I'm an irritating gnat in an elephant's eye," Bryan says. "But the very survival of our union is at stake here. All I'm asking for (in contract negotiations) is to keep what we've got. Not a penny more."

The irritating gnat makes a habit of getting in the face of Gannett officials whenever possible. He attends company shareholder meetings, he writes corporate officials and he contacts members of its board of directors, including ex-First Lady Rosalind Carter.

Bryan's message is simple and consistent: Gannett's corporate greed has turned it against its own employees, which will not serve the company and its financial interests in the long run.

By Rebecca Cook, Detroit Sunday Journal

Detroit newspaper unions and supporters marked the fourth anniversary of their strike-lockout at Gannett's Detroit News and Knight Ridder's Detroit Free Press with a "corporate pig" roast on July 15. At the microphone is Teamsters President James Hoffa.

"If you don't pay your press workers what they deserve and pay to keep your machinery working well, you'll hurt yourself in the end," Bryan says. "Your product will suffer."

One of Bryan's favorite anecdotes -- which he's shared in various letters and public appearances -- involves Nelson Rockefeller being asked in a magazine interview, "How much is enough money?" His response was, "Just one more dollar."

The point, he says, is that Gannett is experiencing record profits and growth -- reflected in huge bonuses paid to its top executives -- while trying to squeeze wage and overtime concessions from the pressmen. He likes to compare the compensation paid to Gannett executives with the dollar amounts involved in his union's dispute with The Enquirer.

According to Gannett's 1998 Annual Report, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer John Curley was paid a salary of $900,000 and bonuses of $1.125 million in cash and 5,763 shares of Gannett stock (valued at about $375,000) in 1998. Vice Chairman and President Douglas McCorkindale was paid a salary of $800,000 and bonuses of $1.068 million in cash and 5,475 shares of Gannett stock (valued at about $357,000).

Curley's total compensation last year amounted to $2.4 million. McCorkindale's was $2.225 million.

The total annual salaries of all of the Western Avenue pressmen, Bryan says, is about $3 million (100 people at an average salary of $30,000). Even if The Enquirer were to grant the union a decent raise of 5 percent, that amounts to about $150,000 over the next year. And Bryan estimates that the dispute over overtime procedures amounts to a total of about $500,000 in overtime pay.

So for less than one-third of the chairman's yearly compensation, Bryan says, Gannett could have union peace in Cincinnati and foster a cooperative attitude as The Enquirer's printing facility expands to meet increased demand.

"Gannett needs to realize that their employees are not their enemies," he says. "Gannett should get its money from the market and advertisers, not from its employees."

Those same sentiments run high in Detroit, where locked out workers recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of their strike against Gannett and Knight-Ridder with a "corporate pig roast." National Teamsters President James Hoffa congratulated the workers on their integrity and fortitude.

"There's the problem," Hoffa said at the workers' picnic, pointing to Detroit News/ Detroit Free Press building across the street. "It's corporate greed. That's what our enemy is, and that's what our fight is."

Bryan makes a point to say that he, too, is fighting corporate greed and absentee ownership and not necessarily his superiors or employers. If he could negotiate a fair contract for his workers, he says, they'd be happy employees.

But the pressmen's union is up against long odds, says a local labor expert, because the ages-old power struggle between management and labor has shifted to management -- perhaps forever.

"Business is the new ideology in the United States," says Mike Wood, host of Boiling Point, a labor talk show on WAIF (88.3 FM). "The collective bargaining process is so slanted against employees that they don't have any of the power anymore. The courts have consistently passed pro-business rulings in recent labor cases."

Despite that gloomy outlook, The Post's Fisher says, collective bargaining still has its rewards.

"Life is much better at a union paper," Fisher says. "Better pay, better benefits, people looking out for your interests. But it's hard, especially in the current atmosphere across the country. But anything worth having is worth fighting for."

Bryan, 52, has been fighting the fight for a number of years. Like many of his pressroom compatriots, he worked for The Enquirer for more than 20 years, until a hereditary health condition forced him to retire in 1995. He was involved in union activities almost his entire newspaper career, including helping workers outside of Cincinnati organize themselves. When Local 20N got nowhere with The Enquirer in initial negotiations a year ago, he says, he got involved in the union again and became local president.

He misses the old days, Bryan says, when Enquirer Publisher Francis Dale knew the names of every pressman at the paper and employees felt they were part of a family. He understands the nature of media conglomerates in the 1990s and knows the clock can't be turned back.

But he also thinks a key component of employer/employee relationships -- respect -- still is possible in today's corporate climate.

"We the (union) members have been reduced to a collective 'begging' position rather than a posture of collective bargaining," Bryan wrote to the national GCIU office on June 7. "The philosophy of Gannett is an unusual business concept, as they not only attempt to generate as much income as possible through business venture, but also in the process rape their employees' pockets."

"I have no hatred for the Gannett people," Bryan says firmly. "I have unmeasurable animosity for what they do. It's not a people business anymore." ©

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