Stopping the press in Pittsburgh: a city remembers its labor past.

Pat McDonough, a Teamster delivery driver for the Pittsburgh Press, smiled as he marched past the downtown building that housed the 108-yearold newspaper. The Press had not been published since May 16. The masthead from newspaper pioneer E.W. Scripps, known to millions in a dozen cities by its lighthouse logo, stood out in the night as thousands of strikers and their supporters encircled the block: "Give light and the people will find their own way."

"We're finding our way, all fight," said McDonough, "and it won't be back into that place until we have a contract."

The 5,000 who, along with McDonough, massed July 26 at the Press building surprised the organizers of the Pittsburgh Newspaper Unions Unity Council, a sometimes disparate in gathering of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and ten other unions representing 1,250 members. Two nights later, perhaps 10,000 people attended a prayer vigil which turned into a "strategic victory" rally when the newspaper announced it was stopping the publication of a nonunion edition it had trucked in from out of town. These were dramatic events for union workers and sympathizers in their battle with one of the nation's largest newspaper chains.

What happened in the forty-eight hours between the first and second demonstration in the center of this city that has symbolized industrial power for much of this century was remarkable even to cynical business observers. "A Strikebreaking Bust" headlined the weekly Pittsburgh Business Times. It went on to say that the Press' s "replacement worker gambit collapsed under pressure from a surprising display of union clout...and overwhelming public support for the strikers... [and which] most observers considered a stunning victory for labor."

Labor in Pittsburgh, and most other urban centers of manufacturing, has not enjoyed many victories in recent years. Unions such as the steelworkers' and the miners' have taken especially hard hits in the Reagan-Bush decade, a period in which core manufacturing industries declined dramatically in states like Pennsylvania. And during the past year Pittsburgh has experienced two other significant strikes--a three-week strike by Transit Authority bus drivers and a six-week strike at Giant Eagle, the area's largest grocery chain.

Those two work stoppages had mixed results. The public responded with sympathy and support to the grocery clerks and meat cutters, helping them to win a new contract. However, bus drivers gained little support and received a critical blow as the newspaper walkout approached its confrontation. A judge ordered 2,700 transit drivers and mechanics back to work in April, and on July 30 the State Supreme Court upheld that ruling, saying that binding arbitration was not required. They are still working without a contract.

At the Press, management turned to a badly-conceived and crude strategy of bringing in outside replacement workers to drive the routes of 600 Teamsters, who along with most of the other Press unions had been working without a contract since last December. Advertisements placed in Boston newspapers promised $15-hourly wages "for temporary work in a labor dispute." More than a hundred replacement workers were transported to Pittsburgh and housed in suburban motels.

The tactic, reported every day on local television and radio, cut into the raw nerve of the Pittsburgh area, still experiencing the aftershock of the almost total shutdown of the Western Pennsylvania steel industry and the erosion of thousands of other manufacturing jobs in the past decade. "Everyone knows someone who lost a good job, and many of them experienced it in their own family," says labor economist Edmund Ayoub of Duquesne University. "Public revulsion of bringing in replacement workers--and they are called scabs here--was just too much to take."

This scenario, serious though it is to the Pittsburgh economy, took on an almost comic opera aspect with the daily bungling of the parent E.W. Scripps Company and their Press managers. "If we went to central casting and asked them to bring in some heavies to make stupid decisions, we could not have done better," said George Curtin, a coordinator for the Unity Council.

A termination notice earlier in the year to some 4,300 boys and girls who distribute the Press and the morning Post Gazette--another tactic in management's new distribution plans--made the newspaper a Scrooge employer from the start of the impasse. Incredibly, intimidating letters were also sent to carriers who distributed the union weekly on their old routes, and who formed effective information lines at Toys 'R Us, an advertiser who patronized the Press's strikebreaking "shopper." Then the company supplemented its own guards with an outside security force, clad in military-type uniforms complete with combat boots. "We couldn't believe it," said McDonough. "Brown shirts and most of them wore those dark sunglasses like a Southern sheriff!" These guards were beefed up by other security from Vance International, a Virginia-based agency which has a long track record in labor disputes.

Initially, the newspaper's agenda was to eliminate 450 of the 600 Teamster drivers and implement a new distribution system using some thirty city and suburban drop-offpoints instead of the thousands of drops the Teamsters make to get the papers to neighborhood route carriers. The paper intends to hire part time adults to deliver the papers in their own cars instead of the traditional youth carriers. According to Deborah Reed of Frontlash, a labor-student coalition, grandfathers and senior neighbors, fixed-income seniors, would drive the routes. "A few senior citizens are easier to control than one Teamster driver," Reed said.

The Press contends that the present distribution system is too costly, and thus it needs to eliminate three-quarters of the present Teamster drivers and distributors. The company says that each Teamster job costs it in excess of $52,000 annually, factoring in benefits and incentives. According to the New York Times (August 16), teamster salaries average $43,000. The Unity Council puts that figure in the mid-thirties. The management attitude apparently was expressed by Post-Gazette editor John Craig, who said that the drivers had "simply stayed too long at the dinner table." The union disputes the company's figures, and while it acknowledges that staffing changes are necessary, it is unwilling to accept such a deep cut in its membership. Shortly before the July 26 confrontation, the company lowered the number of jobs it sought to cut to 225.

Earlier this year Steelworkers President Lynn Williams could look out of his twelfth-floor office next to the Press building and saw the approaching storm. He authorized the AFL-CIO Strategic Approaches Committee to send in a team to work with the Unity Council. The union turned over a first floor meeting hall and offices to the strikers, a command post that would prove invaluable during the strike.

A warning by the two newspapers that they would resume publication on July 27 "with or without" their union workers set the stage for confrontation. The city canceled all police leaves and made a show of force at the newspaper building, which faces a park at the confluence of the three rivers which frames Pittsburgh's "Golden Triangle." Rumors of an eleventh-hour agreement proved false as pickets reported the sounds of the presses starting up (a week earlier the Press had covered up the display windows that had always offered a view of the mechanical process for both newspapers). Shrouded in secrecy, protected by its private security force, the company began to move the replacement drivers into its delivery compound in rented vans.

Some time after 6:30 on the morning of July 27 a phalanx of city police, using billy clubs, attempted to move hundreds of strikers away from the compound entrance. At this point one of the strikers yelled, "Sit down!" The well-tried labor and civil rights technique worked. A burly retired steelworker, George Edwards, was the first of a dozen to be arrested. Others immediately took their places, locked arms, and sat down until the police decided that they could not clear the way.

In several suburban distribution centers, the inevitable smashing of windows and isolated violence took place. But the company's next step proved more than counterproductive. The newspapers were being trucked in--first, it was believed, from Ohio and then from Canada. It was the final assault on irate local working people--a newspaper distributed by out-of-state drivers and printed over the border.

The city responded quickly, declaring that it would revoke the newspaper's tax exemptions because it was publishing outside the city and that it would have to pay occupancy and wage taxes for the replacement workers. "A scab tax," said Pittsburgh' s finance director. A local judge issued an injunction barring the newspaper from requiring independent dealers to cross picket lines, saying they were in violation of the state's antistrikebreaker law.

The mayor of one suburban community ordered a distribution center in his town closed because of code violations and its proximity to a day-care center. Other officials did the same, reflecting the views of Pittsburgh City Council President Jack Wagner who said, "People here look after their own, and today they are fighting harder than ever for their jobs." The city's mayor joined an estimated 15,000 who canceled their subscriptions to the Press. Critical to the abortive two-day publication termination, however, was the absence of any significant advertising. Pittsburgh department stores and food chains, knowing the depth of community support for the strikers, ignored the "scab-produced" editions.

The Pittsburgh newspaper face-off reflects the crunch on dally print publications in a diminished market, but also an aggressive stance by the parent Scripps Company, a Cincinnati-based media conglomerate which is the nation's eighth-largest newspaper publisher. The Press is one of the largest of its nineteen daily properties (Scripps also has ten television and five radio stations).

According to the Wall Street Journal, Scripps is now "playing hardball with organized labor" and is investing in a costly strategy of replacement workers, expanded security, and even out-of-town publication to wait out the union. They are publishing a four-days-a-week shopper written without bylines by newspeople who remain on the payroll (a Guild contract was rejected by newsroom staff last year). The Press went to federal court August 4 to challenge Pennsylvania' s antistrikebreaker law. But the attempt to overturn the twenty-year-old Pennsylvania Strikebreakers Act was rejected on August 15 by United States District Court Judge Donald Ziegler. "This is not going to be resolved in the courts," said Joseph Molino, president of Local 221 of the Teamsters.

The ultimate irony of the Scripps confrontation with its workers was that the region, with its long and deep labor organizing heritage, had just completed commemorating the centennial of the Homestead Strike. That classic confrontation marked the bloody battle won by labor against the hired Pinkerton security agents of Andrew Carnegie on July 6, 1892--only to lose the war with the arrival of the Pennsylvania militia. As a result, unionism in the steel industry was suppressed for more than four decades.

"That battle was over replacement workers," says Pittsburgh labor lawyer Jay Horuack, "and here we are one hundred years later with the management people who believe that is an appropriate, ethical tactic ." A comment by Rosemary Trump, the president of a service employee union and one of the area's most respected labor leaders, and co-chair of the committee that commemorated the Homestead Strike Centennial for five days earlier in the month, may have cut to the real issue as understood by most Pittsburgh people.

"The Press and the parent company who are really calling the shots have totally lost the war for the 'hearts and minds' of local people," Trump said. "They have been rejected by their own advertisers, by the city and area politicians, and by their subscribers. Now they see the possibility of a conservative judiciary providing them the opportunity to again publish nonunion. They have absolutely no lines into the community which any good newspaper should have."

Earlier in July, Yale historian David Montgomery had told the Homestead celebrants that the commemoration "entails more than just romantic nostalgia. The men and women who fought for hearth and home in 1892 provided a lesson as important for our age as it was for their own. A society which celebrates economic growth at the expense of community values and decent standards of life for all...makes its people the victims of. whatever prosperity it experiences."

Homestead became a symbolic watershed for labor in the twilight years of the nineteenth century, one of many violent confrontations that signaled the supremacy of concentrated capital and its reliance upon the armed force of the state in labor disputes. How labor can define itself in the Press dispute may hold some insight into the future of unionism in an era where the erosion of good jobs in the private sector has depleted much of the ranks of organized labor, and which may now be cutting into the middle class that once saw itself as apart from traditional workers.

RUSSELL W. GIBBONS is with the Philip Murray Institute of Labor Studies in Pittsburgh, and was director of the 1892 Homestead Strike Centennial. A former communications director of the United Steelworkers of America, he is co-editor of The River Ran Red: Homestead 1892 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992) and a contributor to Labor Conflict in America (Garland Press, 1990).