DETROIT NEWSPAPERS AGREE TO END STRIKE, REHIRE WORKERS GRADUALLY.Byline: Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire Detroit's daily newspapers accepted on Wednesday the offers by six striking unions to return to work unconditionally, in a bid to end 19 months of bitter strife that had been the nation's longest ongoing strike. Proposing to gradually bring former strikers back to jobs as they open up, newspaper executives said the first returning strikers could be at work as early as next week. ``Now is the time to get past the bitterness and start to heal the wounds together,'' said Susie Ellwood, vice president and spokeswoman for Detroit Newspapers Inc., the business agency for the Detroit Free Press The Detroit Free Press is the largest daily newspaper in Detroit, Michigan, USA. It is sometimes informally referred to as the "Freep". Some still refer to it locally as "The Friendly" -- a slogan from an ad campaign in the '70s. and The Detroit News. However, union leaders blasted blast·ed adj. 1. Used as an intensive: I hate these blasted flies. 2. Slang Drunk or intoxicated. 3. Blighted, withered, or shriveled. the company plan, terming the gradual call-back a lockout lockout, intentional closing up of a company, factory, or shop by an employer to prevent employees from working during a strike or labor dispute. The term lockout and vowing to seek a federal court injunction to force the newspapers to take back all former strikers at once. ``The unions have made a good-faith effort to stop the pain and suffering in this community, and the employer again has told us in this community to go to hell,'' said Al Derey, president of the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions. ``In the face of this rejection, we are off to the National Labor Relations Board National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), independent agency of the U.S. government created under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 (Wagner Act), and amended by the acts of 1947 (Taft-Hartley Labor Act) and 1959 (Landrum-Griffin Act), which affirmed labor's right and the federal court.'' Although the unions made offers to return to work over the weekend, they said they would continue picketing picketing, act of patrolling a place of work affected by a strike in order to discourage its patronage, to make public the workers' grievances, and in some cases to prevent strikebreakers from taking the strikers' jobs. Picketing may be by individuals or by groups. newspaper plants and urging readers and advertisers to boycott boycott, concerted economic or social ostracism of an individual, group, or nation to express disapproval or coerce change. The practice was named (1880) after Capt. the papers. About 2,500 employees struck the newspapers July 13, 1995. About 500 later crossed the picket lines and came back to work. About 100 have retired, about 100 have resigned or moved away and almost 200 have been fired for strike-related offenses. |
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