GCIU Pres. George Tedeschi addresses the North American Newspaper Conference (NANC). Seated from left are Toronto 100M Pres. Brian Fletcher, NANC president, and New York 1SE Pres. Frank Mailander, NANC stereotyper vice president.

Boston 3N Pres. Martin Callaghan, left, and Boston 3N and NANC Rec. Secy. Frank Rak, right, talk with GCIU Vice Pres. Gerald H. Deneau.

GCIU Vice Pres. Lawrence Martinez urged delegates to register and vote in the U.S. elections. Seated from left are Boston 3N and NANC Secy.-Treas Kevin Toomey; New York 1SE Pres. Frank Mailander, NANC vice president; and Toronto 100M and NANC Pres. Brian Fletcher.

Quebecor workers and organizers describe their campaigns. Standing from left are GCIU Organizer Matt Brown; William Jones from the Covington, Tenn., plant; GCIU Lead Organizer Marty Keegan; and Bonnie Goodlett from the Versailles, Ky. plant.

New York 2N Secy.-Treas. Roger Carbo, left, and Pres. William Loftus, right, pause with guest speaker Fernando Ferrer, former Democratic mayoral candidate and director of the progressive Drum Major Institute.

Taking a break are, from left, Calgary 34M Pres. Dale McKnight; Mathew Wenner, Employer Retirement Fund administrator; Atlanta 8M Pres. Dale Harrell; and Richard J. Whitworth, executive assistant to the GCIU president.

From left are Baltimore 31N Pres. Clyde Clemens, GCIU Lead Organizer Robert J. Robinson, and GCIU Organizing Dir. Bert Haft.

Delegates to the 48th North American Newspaper Conference traded views on local and international union events, including the proposed merger with the Teamsters, organizing, coordinated bargaining, and the U.S. elections.

The 96 delegates from 44 local unions also discussed the International's new technical training program and safety and health issues. They unanimously endorsed the Million Worker March on Washington scheduled for Oct. 17. The march is centered on such issues as health care, Social Security, jobs, education, poverty, and housing.

Hosted by New York 2N, the meeting got off with a bang with music from the New York City Police Department's Pipe and Drum Band. Local 2N Pres. William E. Loftus welcomed the delegates to New York City.

Organizing campaigns

Delegates gave a standing ovation to workers trying to organize Quebecor plants in Versailles, Ky., and Covington, Tenn. Delegates also chipped in more than $1,000 to help defray travel expenses for the workers.

Bonnie Goodlett, who has worked 22 years in the pressroom in Versailles, said their campaign is "growing by leaps and bounds." She said "everything has changed" in their approach since the last time they tried to organize the plant. She added that this time: "We're going to get the union–come hell or high water."

Organizing Director Bert Haft and Contracts and Research Director Alan M. Tate outlined strategies in the seven-site Quebecor campaign, with assistance from the AFL-CIO, Communications Workers, Teamsters, and other unions.

The campaign includes in-plant organizing teams, customer and community outreach and actions, and coordination with unions in the 17 countries where Quebecor has facilities. The community outreach strategy has led to support for the Quebecor workers from religious leaders and members of Congress, including John Kerry, the leading Democratic presidential candidate.

Haft praised the Quebecor workers for their solidarity and strength. Noting the GCIU asks these workers to do such difficult tasks as housecalls and meetings with company officials, Haft said: "If you don't think that's scary for them, these people have no rights. They're non-union. They're putting their jobs on the line every day."

Haft said the goal is for Montreal-based Quebecor to sign an agreement promising that the company will remain neutral in organizing campaigns and stop harassing and threatening workers. Another goal is to get Quebecor to agree to negotiate with the GCIU when the union gets representation cards signed by 50 percent plus one worker.

Haft stressed that what the GCIU is asking of the giant printing company are simply "basic human rights."

Tate said the customer actions have proved very effective in getting Quebecor's attention. He said the GCIU contacted about 300 of Quebecor's customers, asking them to support the right of workers to organize. The campaign then targeted several major customers, including IKEA and Victoria's Secret. GCIU and other union activists went to dozens of IKEA and Victoria's Secret stores and distributed informational leaflets.

Tate said that within weeks of those actions, management of Sweden-based IKEA–with support contributed by the Swedish printing union–and Victoria's Secret contacted Quebecor, urging the company to meet with the GCIU. Consequently, Quebecor requested meetings.

International Pres. George Tedeschi pledged the campaign will continue. "Win or lose, we're going to fight," he said.

GCIU Secy.-Treas. Gerald H. Deneau stressed the importance of international union solidarity actions on behalf of the Quebecor and other campaigns. He and GCIU vice presidents Lawrence Martinez and Duncan K. Brown are the GCIU representatives to the Union Network International (UNI), a 15 million-member global federation of printing and other unions.

Deneau said that, leading up to the major Quebecor conference in Memphis last year, UNI sponsored delegations in Latin America and Europe to link workers on those continents and North America around common issues. "That's what made it all come together," he said.

In other organizing developments, GCIU Lead Organizer Robert J. Robinson told delegates about the union's efforts to organize carriers and get fair contracts at Gannett newspapers. The GCIU won an organizing victory among carriers at Gannett's Louisville Courier-Journal.

The union then won a landmark National Labor Relations Board decision that the carriers have the right to join a union because they are employees of the newspaper and not independent contractors, as the company claimed. While that ruling is under appeal by the company, Robinson said, the GCIU is conducting further organizing campaigns at the Arizona Republic and other Gannett newspapers.

Bargaining updates

Louisville 619M Secy.-Treas. Mike Heine reported that the organizing campaign helped win a new pact for pressmen and engravers at the Courier-Journal, whose previous contract expired in August 2000. Heine said the new five-year contract includes 18 percent wage increases over the life of the pact and improvements in sick pay, vacation, holiday, and apprentice provisions.

San Francisco 4N Pres. Ed Rosario, Chicago 7N Pres. John Giannone, Newark 8N Vice Pres. Lawrence Manziano, Atlanta 8M Pres. Dale Harrell, and other delegates reported on the successful negotiations with Dow Jones on common contract provisions for eight local unions. With assistance from Martinez and GCIU Rep. Joseph O'Connor, the locals dealt with wages, manning, bonuses, overtime, and other issues.

Praising the success of the Dow Jones bargaining, Rosario said: "I can't stress any stronger how we need to go in this direction. . . . I would urge that GCIU get involved in this same pattern bargaining linking our common global issues with other major publishers. . . . It would put us more in a place of strength so the publisher can't pick one site over the other."

In updates on other regional and local events, Midwest Newspaper 128N Pres. Bill Miller reported on the local's struggle to get a first contract for mailroom workers at Cox's Dayton Daily News. The workers haven't had a contract in nearly a decade and the company imposed a 20 percent pay cut. He said, the local is coordinating with Atlanta 527S, which is trying to get a first contract in the mailroom at Cox's Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Montreal 41M Pres. Michel Côté thanked delegates for contributing more than $1,200 to support Local 41M members on strike at Centre d'Accès à L'Information Juridique and Washington 72C members on strike at IPI Lithography and Graphics in Upper Marlboro, Md.

Merger debate

Toronto 500M Pres. Norm Beattie

The GCIU's proposed merger with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters was the focus of a long and heated debate among delegates.

Tedeschi responded to delegates' concerns related to the proposed merger, including the Justice Department's continuing supervision of the Teamsters union, the Teamsters Information Terminal Accounting Network (TITAN IV) that is required for local unions, GCIU autonomy, dues structures, and the financial condition of the Teamsters.

Noting the steep membership losses suffered by GCIU over the past two decades due primarily to plant closings, Tedeschi said the reason the General Board chose the Teamsters over the other two unions under consideration &#;the Communications Workers and PACE–was "common sense and logic."

"We are at a crossroads," Tedeschi said. "We can continue to have the status quo. Or, we can merge with a union that has significant resources and strength. The real world is they [the IBT] have that. They are way ahead of the other internationals."

Tedeschi said no merger agreement "is going to be perfect. Nothing we're going to do is going to satisfy everybody. But . . . we're a democracy. And a very fair democracy. Every member will be able to read the merger agreement" and vote on it.

Deneau said the GCIU is "in the black. We're in good shape financially." He said the GCIU's financial condition means there is time for careful consideration on merger. "I just don't see the need to rush on this thing without getting all the facts," he said.

U.S. elections

Saying the upcoming November elections in the United States are "absolutely the most important choice between candidates and political philosophies that working Americans have ever had," Martinez urged delegates to register, vote and help campaign for John Kerry and pro-working family candidates in the House and Senate.

On every issue in the past four years, including the economy, worker and human rights, job safety and health, Social Security, Medicare, and the environment, the Bush administration "has proven to be anti-worker, anti-union, and restrictive of human rights," Martinez said. "With people power at the polls, we can make a change for the good," Martinez said.

Guest speaker Fernando Ferrer, former Bronx Borough president for 14 years, said the Bush administration's and Congress' record on trade, the export of U.S. jobs overseas, and tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations demonstrates their neglect of the middle class. "The bulwark of a . . . strong North America has been its middle class," he said. "When that middle class erodes, there's a problem, and there's no bigger enemy of the middle class than that crowd in Washington today."

Ferrer, president of the progressive Drum Major Institute, said the current attack on the middle class is "no accident." It is a "consequence of somebody needing to dip into your pockets to pay the bills–bills that you had no say in incurring. . . . While we hold a party for those who least deserve it, while we only reward wealth, we seem by our national, and even state and local policy, to penalize work."

Ferrer urged delegates: "It seems to me that this is the moment for the creator of the American middle class–the American labor movement–to step up and say, 'no there is another answer.'"

Technical training and pensions

Rob Theisen, director of Philadelphia 14M's Graphic Arts Institute, outlined the International's updated web press training course that is scheduled to begin operation in July.

Mathew J. Wenner, administrator of the GCIU Employer Retirement Fund, noted that fund trustees were forced to slow the benefit accrual rate and make other changes in response to the extremely poor performance of financial markets during the Bush recession.

However, Wenner said, the fund, with more than $1.2 billion in assets, still placed in the top 27th percentile of Taft-Hartley funds.

He said the fund also still outperforms 401(k)s in returns to beneficiaries. "Where else can you go to purchase a lifetime income that guarantees a return of your principal in 3.5 years," he said.

Lining up to speak on the proposed merger are, from left: Toronto 100M Exec. Vice Pres. Tom Donnelly; Chicago 7N Pres. John Giannone; Edmonton 255C Secy.-Treas. Ron Bron; New York 1L Secy.-Treas. and General Board member Anthony Caifano; and GCIU Vice Pres. David A. Grabhorn.

Delegates discuss common issues at newspapers and production plants operated by the Tribune Co.