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CALGARY HERALD STRIKERS FIGHTING FOR JUSTICE
(This article is from the Jan. 16-31/2000 issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $25/year, or $12 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $25 US per year; other overseas readers - $25 US or $35 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, 706 Clark Drive, Vancouver, Canada, V5L 3J1.)
By Kimball Cariou
AS THE NEW YEAR BEGINS, striking workers at the Calgary Herald have taken their struggle out into the community, distributing up to 4,000 leaflets a day in neighbourhoods, at the stores and offices of Herald advertisers and at special events. Their goal is to "let everyone know in no uncertain terms how shabbily the Calgary Herald treats its employees and how it is thwarting our democratic right to a fair collective agreement."
More than 200 people from the Herald's newsroom and distribution centre - members of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union Local 115A, and the Graphic Communications International Union Local 34M - have been on strike for a fair first collective agreement since Nov. 8.
The Herald strike has become a rallying point for resistance to Conrad Black's attempts to crush workers' democratic rights during labour disputes at the Herald, the Jerusalem Post, the Regina Leader-Post and Le Soleil - a few of the more than 600 newspapers he owns worldwide, including his Southam chain.
The unions predict that as collective agreements come up for renewal at his other papers, Black will try to crush them, too. The outcome of the Herald strike will have far-reaching implications for thousands of workers.
With so much at stake, the Canadian Labour Congress is backing the strikers with a country-wide boycott of the National Post, Black's rival to the Globe and Mail in the "national daily" newspaper market.
The demands of the Herald strikers are far from extravagant. They are attempting to win a fair wage grid and a seniority clause to protect workers from indiscriminate layoffs at management's whim, and to have their existing benefits written into the contract. GCIU members want work schedules allowing them two consecutive days off.
These demands are already in place in collective agreements throughout the Southam chain, yet the company rejects proposals for the most basic of standard contract language. Instead, management has hired crews of highly-paid (and electronically-monitored!) scabs to produce a newspaper filled with typos and errors. The paper apparently had to spend thousands of dollars to correct mistaken ads in its "millennium supplement."
During the normally lucrative holiday season, the Herald's bottom line was badly hurt by the strike. On Boxing Day, for example, the paper had a paltry press run of 116,000 copies, down from 140,000 on Boxing Day 1998. According to the unions' web site, thousands of copies are routinely dumped into recycling, meaning that "Boxing Day circulation likely was somewhere below 100,000."
In another sign of the times, a few days before Christmas, the Herald contained one lonely advertising insert, while competitor The Sun was "stuffed to overflowing."
The unions also report that while an independent survey by the Vancouver firm of Campbell Goodell and Traynor Consultants shows Herald readership is down by 25 per cent, ad rates may increase early this year, a tough sell for advertisers.
The dispute has also hurt Calgary charities. The Herald's Christmas Fund stood at $321,901 as of Dec. 29, some thirty percent less than 1998's figure of $456,019. The charities' suffering reflects the drop in readership - a clear indication Calgarians disapprove of the Herald's treatment of the strikers.
On the legal front, the Alberta Labour Relations Board on Jan. 5 rejected a bid to limit the number of striking members picketing at the Herald building. The board also refused to impose any restraint on where picketers can stand in relation to property entrances.
However, the next day the board filed in court an order preventing picketers from holding up vehicles entering and leaving the property. This makes it possible for any person who does stop a vehicle to be charged with contempt under the criminal code.
While the two unions are pleased they can continue to picket, the decision makes it almost impossible to pass information to motorists entering or exiting the property, which is a right under the labour code.
"This is a serious assault on freedom of expression," said Andy Marshall, President of Local 115A. "Distributing information is fundamental to a strike. It's ironic that a newspaper is silencing dissenting views."
"This is ridiculous. Even people who want to stop and take our information can't take it, because they might slow down someone who is behind them" said GCIU president John Webster.
The company applied to the board for a ruling after about 70 strikers gathered for a show of solidarity Jan. 4. A similar application from the Herald was rejected on Dec. 13.
In yet another development involving the LRB, the newspaper's management faced a "bad-faith" bargaining hearing on Jan. 6-7. The Board had ordered the Herald to hold "productive talks" with striking GCIU members, giving the union the right to decide whether the talks were productive. When the GCIU decided this was not the case, it was back to the LRB for the bad-faith bargaining hearing.
The Herald's press operators, who are not allowed to honour the CEP-GCIU picket line, will soon be at the bargaining table. So will their counterparts at the Edmonton Journal, whose contract expired December 31.
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