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| GCIU Secy.-Treas. Gerald H. Deneau addresses the Dec. 11 rally in Calgary. |
The council resolution said the strike forced on 230 members of GCIU Local 34M and Communications, Energy and Paperworkers (CEP) Local 115A has hurt the city's reputation and escalated policing costs since the dispute began on Nov. 8.
Help Calgary strikers |
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GCIU Vice Pres. James J. Cowan said the strikers at the Calgary Herald urgently need the
support of all GCIU locals and members.
All financial contributions will be put into a joint GCIU/CEP account and "will be used to finance the campaign to expose and stop the union-busting tactics of Conrad Black," he said. Checks, made payable to GCIU Local 34-M Strike Fund my be sent to 3424 26th Street, N.E., #2A, Calgary, Alberta, T1Y 4T7 |
To support the strikers, advertising and subscription boycotts have been launched against the Herald and the National Post, another newspaper controlled by media mogul Conrad Black. Black owns Hollinger Inc., which operates 58 of Canada's 105 daily newspapers, according to the CEP. Black took over the Herald in 1996 after Hollinger bought out Southam Inc. Black also owns the Chicago Sun-Times and the Daily Telegraph in London, England.
GCIU Rep. Alan M. Tate, who has been assisting with the strike, said "there has been a tremendous response to the boycott. We commissioned a poll which showed that readership of the Herald has declined by 25 percent since the strike began. The people of Calgary have shown tremendous support for the strike."
Pres. John Webster of Alberta 34M, which represents the 67 distribution, loading dock, machine shop and press cleaning workers on strike at the Herald, said "the determination of our members has been incredible. A key factor has been the solidarity between the two striking unions and the great support from other unions in Alberta and across Canada."
The boycott of Black's National Post was launched at a Dec. 17 press conference by Canadian Labour Congress Pres. Ken Georgetti. "This boycott approval gives the Calgary strikers the tools they need to put pressure on Conrad Black right across this country to resolve this dispute. The National Post is being used to break this strike, and we are giving our membership the mandate to bring economic pressure to bear on the post in support of the strikers," Georgetti said.
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| Alberta 34M Pres. John Webster speaks at the Dec. 11 rally. |
Strike issues
The Local 34M members and the 163 CEP editorial workers were trying to negotiate a first-time contract with the Herald when the strike began. Local 34M also represents some 110 members in the press and mail rooms, who are forbidden to strike under Alberta labor law because they have an existing contract.
GCIU Vice Pres. James J. Cowan said: "It has become clear that the Calgary Herald and Conrad Black do not want these workers to have a collective agreement."
Cowan said the company refused to include seniority, vacations, holidays, and health and welfare benefits in the contract, even those already in existence at the paper. Management refused to negotiate a wage grid, insisting that wages be set arbitrarily by individual managers, he noted. The company also refused to negotiate a reasonable schedule for part-time distribution workers and demanded that full-time machinists, electricians, press cleaners, and loading dock workers be required to work a sixth over-time shift at straight-time rates.
"This is a strike for the rights of these workers to be represented by a union and enjoy the basic provisions of a collective agreement," Cowan said.
Tate said union leaders in Canada believe that the Herald's strategy is being directed by Black in a drive to oust unions at all Black-owned newspapers. "This is a tremendously important strike," he said. "It is clear that Conrad Black has decided to draw a line in the sand in Calgary and that this is just the beginning of an attempt by Black to rid his newspapers of unions. We need to draw our own line in the sand here to stop this campaign of union-busting."
Solid support
Support is flowing in for the strikers from other unions in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, the United States and from as far away as Israel, where Conrad Black ran roughshod over journalists at The Jerusalem Post after buying that paper in 1989, according to a letter of support from the Jerusalem Post workers.
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| Appearing with Santa at the Dec. 11 rally are Jean-Claude Parrot, Canadian Labour Congress executive vice president, and Audrey Cormack, Alberta Federation of Labour president. |
In addition to the boycotts, unions established two websites to support the strikers. The strike website is called The Front Page. Another website called Save the Herald addresses issues behind the National Post boycott. In another example of unions' expanding use of the Internet, supporters of the strikers from British Columbia CEP Local 2000 are using an e-mail chain to set up a "cyber picket line."
The unions also are staging rallies and other events to alert the public to the Herald's refusal to bargain fairly and Black's editorial cutbacks that the CEP journalists are protesting.
Public attention heightened after renowned Canadian authors Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson joined the picket line. "The Calgary Herald was a great paper, and it's being sucked dry," Atwood said. Other well-known Calgary authors who have walked the picket line include Governor General's Award winners Sharon Pollock, Robert Hilles, and Fred Wah, poet Lorrane Raboud-Reece, and novelists Aritha van Herk, Elona Malterre, and Peter Oliva.
GCIU Secy.-Treas. Gerald H. Deneau addressed some 500 strike supporters at the rally on Dec. 11. He told the Graphic Communicator that he was surprised that the peaceful demonstrators were confronted by a horde of police in riot gear, mounted police and a ring of paddy wagons. "They were there to intimidate us," he said.
Deneau said he noticed Local 34M's charter dated in 1910 on the wall of its offices. "The GCIU and its predecessor unions had newspaper locals in Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Boston, New York, Detroit, San Francisco, and other cities long before there was a Conrad Black," Deneau noted.
"A hundred years ago, we had no laws to support us," Deneau said. "The government and its police and militia were against us then, too – some things never change. And there were publishers like Conrad Black. We still organized, and we still negotiated good contracts back then, and we understood the importance of solidarity across borders – that's why we're one union. We've seen the Conrad Black-types come and go. They created the militancy in our organization through their anti-worker actions. And because of our solidarity and militancy, we'll still be here when they're gone."
Strikers and supporters at rallies also have had to deal with a "goon" squad hired by the Herald in August as part of management's preparations for contract negotiations. Alberta officials discovered that the Ontario-based security firm, London Protection International, does not hold the required Alberta license.
Commenting on the discovery, Local 34M Pres. Webster said: "You'd think with all the planning that went into their strike preparation, they'd get the details, like a license done. This is one more example that shows this effort is being directed from Eastern Canada, with little concern for what is important in Calgary."
Journalistic integrity
CEP journalists at the Herald have stressed their problems with management include issues of quality local journalism and the right to be free of harassment and discrimination. The CEP workers said that local coverage was cut by 45 percent after Black took over the newspaper, while full-time workers were replaced with contract writers and wire service copy. They also charge that management editors rewrote their stories to make them conform to Black's conservative editorial and marketing policies without checking facts. When management refused to respond to workers' complaints, they organized the union.
The CEP local said management's discrimination against the union workers was "instantaneous." It said the company gave a Christmas bonus to everyone in the building except the newly unionized staff, a charge which the Alberta Labour Relations Board upheld in September.
The GCIU filed a charge of bad faith bargaining with the labor board. The board adjourned the hearing on the charges and ordered the union and company back to the bargaining table for two days before Dec. 17. With no movement on the company's side during those bargaining sessions, Tate said, the GCIU returned to the court in January to renew its complaint of surface bargaining against the Herald.
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| Union strikers and their supporters stage a sit-down on Nov. 11 to block trucks while Calgary police prepare to move them. |
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