Union Bargaining Made Easy
Remember in The Wizard of Oz how quickly the Winkies lightened up once the Wicked Witch of the West disappeared? A case can be made that the Wicked Witch deserved credit she never received for keeping afloat the Winkie country, where the only apparent cash crop was poppies. But she was nasty and no one liked her. It was sort of like that when Hollinger International’s board reared up last November and got rid of Black and David Radler. His lordship, the flamboyant Black, has preoccupied the international press, which has gone crazy covering the troubles at Hollinger. But locally it was the departure of Radler, Hollinger’s president, that mattered. Radler ruled in Chicago as publisher of the Sun-Times and boss of Hollinger’s Chicago Group. He set the tone, and when he left it wasn’t missed.
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The talks went nowhere. Guild members took to picketing Green’s home and distributing stamped postcards for advertisers to mail to Green asking him to treat the union fairly. Those tactics made negotiations “a lot more personal than I’d like,” says Ted Rilea, Hollinger’s vice president for labor relations in the Chicago Group. “That makes it awfully hard for me when it’s going in that direction.”
Stiefel has a theory. She thinks management finally made concessions because Hollinger is so completely up for grabs. Will the Chicago Group even be a group in six months, or will it have been sold off piecemeal? If it’s still intact, who will own it? Hollinger? If Hollinger owns it, who will own Hollinger? Everything Hollinger owns is in play, so management needs to make everything alluring. “In that atmosphere,” Stiefel reasons, “having an open contract and a hostile labor atmosphere would not cut in your favor.”
The next editions of the Pioneer Press weeklies carried a story by executive editor Paul Sassone reporting that the guild had “rejected a tentative agreement it proposed last week during federal mediation and authorized a strike.” Green was given three times as much space to mourn this “disappointing” development as Stiefel got to speak for the guild. She fired off a letter calling Sassone’s article “one-sided,” “biased,” and “ludicrous,” but it wasn’t printed.
Would you have gotten there under Radler? I ask Rilea.
“John derives no sense of mission out of being perceived to be a tough guy. David felt it was important to the role,” says the Hollinger source quoted earlier. “John’s very thoughtful, very, very intelligent. The tone John is setting is that the organization is not going to operate on the principles of fear and division. The question is, how will employees feel when they don’t get as much as they want out of John Cruickshank? There’s a long history at the Sun-Times where perfectly decent human beings in management were chewed up because they weren’t tough enough.”
