“It’ll be ugly for a few days but he’s banking on what happened with the unions in Ireland and England, especially on Fleet Street with him and Murdoch,” Blaine said. “Even without a contract, Brady couldn’t start changing work rules because he couldn’t know how the feds at the National Labor Relations Board would react. So he kept baiting the drivers, hoping they’d lose their heads.”
“Which they apparently did,” Jamie said, patting the discoloration around his eye.
Blaine ignored him and kept talking. “That guy they fired last night? Young polish guy, long name I can’t even pronounce. He’s been working half shifts for two years since he hit a pole with his truck in a snowstorm in the suburbs. The kid’s in a coma for almost a week, then he wakes up and he’s not all there. Not incapacitated, still able to work, just not quite the same. So they let him stay on half a day, drive a short route. Then suddenly Brady’s guy is telling him he’s got to drive a full shift. He freaks out, says he can’t because of his condition. They give him a full truck anyway. He refuses to get in, they fire the poor fuck, escort him out of the plant. A dozen guys follow to see what’s going on. That’s it—they’ve left their posts without authorization. They’re fired too. All hell breaks loose. The drivers are out in the street, carrying on. Here come the scabs, on cue. The whole thing was organized by the strike-busting lawyer from out of town that Brady has had negotiating for him. The Mayor went along with the police protection because Brady helped put a Republican in a Democrat’s town in office. And now you’re all here, taking a strike vote.”
“Yeah,” Jamie said, “but you know a lot of city room guys don’t see this as their fight. They know there are no jobs out there. Papers are cutting back—if not closing. I’m not so sure we vote to go out in sympathy.”
Blaine laughed—too derisively, Jamie thought.
“Listen, kiddo, sympathy has nothing to do with this—and neither does right and wrong. It’s only about power and leverage, about which jobs are more essential in putting out the damn paper. That’s the drivers, not us. They got wire copy to replace us with—or I should say you. There are guys working in subway booths who think they can do what we do—tell a story and put their name on top of it. So the drivers are steering this ship. And when I say strike vote, I don’t mean like this is some fucking democracy. This union isn’t run by everyone in here. It’s run by them.”
He jerked a thumb in the direction of the union chiefs, making their way to the front. They were led by Sandy Robbins, president of the Alliance—the union representing the Trib’s editorial and advertising employees. Right with them was Jamie’s cousin, beaming as if he were standing in front of the Pulitzer committee.
“If they want the Alliance out with the other unions, then the Alliance is going out,” Blaine said.
“So what are you doing here?”
Blaine pulled a notepad from his back pocket and held it up like a school-bus pass.
“I’m the local guy, remember?” he said. “I don’t do Hillary health care, unless she’s got some sick aunt holed up in White Plains. I don’t do Contracts with America, unless it’s a mob hit ordered by one of the New York families.”
For once, Blaine looked and sounded more sad than cynical.
“Whatever happens here, it’s a story,” he said. “And I’ll probably be the only one with a staff byline in tomorrow’s paper.”
He laughed. Mainly, it seemed, at himself.
“So be thankful that you’re on the side going out,” he said.
Chapter Five
Sandy Robbins was a roundish, smallish incongruity, unimposing except for a commanding baritone voice. Gray wisps above his ears and a few loose strands spared him total baldness. His oval-shaped face was embellished by a bushy mustache. His stubby arms and barrel chest made him look like the image of a small prehistoric creature in a children’s book.
The more benevolent likeness was Danny DeVito.
His tough talk never seemed to find its way into any new contract. The annual 1.5 percent raises he negotiated for the Trib’s editorial union—officially known as the Alliance of Editorial and Advertising Workers—drew collective sighs. He’d been called a weasel by disgruntled rank-and-filers for so many years that even he had to grudgingly answer to the handle Wheezy. Robbins maintained it dated to his days on the Trib’s advertising team when allergies could set him off on an extended sneezing seizure.
The truth was that most Alliance members understood the newspaper business was not thriving. Robbins would defend his work with heartfelt speeches at union meetings. “You have to understand that the most profitable papers are in cities that are only able to sustain one,” he had said when Jamie attended a recent meeting—for the first and only time. “This is the country’s most competitive market. The Trib is struggling. It was losing money for years with Maxine.”
Maxine Hancock was the matriarchal owner who had generally played by contract rules, even as she pinched pennies to keep her losses from getting out of hand. But this was the first contract showdown with Brady, whose anti-labor reputation preceded him. Every Trib union had been on edge.
“Sandy, explain one thing,” a voice called out from the back of the room. It was Paul Shapiro, the Trib’s Albany bureau chief. Shapiro lived in the woods between Saratoga and the state capital and looked the part. His dark wavy hair was worn shaggily long. His Smith Brothers beard needed serious grooming. An avid hunter and outdoorsman, Shapiro liked to chide his downstate colleagues as liberal gun control wimps and brag to them that he had the paper’s best assignment. When Jamie’s copy boy and clerk duties included answering phones, Shapiro would call in and ask, “How’s life in the cesspool?”
“The drivers walk out after everyone agrees that's the last thing we should do because the climate isn’t very good for a strike and no one wants to be out with the holidays coming up,” Shapiro said. “What I want to know is, are we talking about going out because they went out, or because we’ve reached an impasse in our own negotiations and think Brady won’t negotiate a fair contract with us?”
Robbins legitimized the question by nodding vigorously.
“Paulie, I know what you’re getting at, but let me say this. We have been without a contract now for six months and have had talks with Brady’s lawyer for nine. We’ve gotten nowhere on any of the pertinent issues. They did make one offer, as you know. It was so regressive on job security and guaranteed work hours that the negotiating committee was compelled to unanimously reject it.
“Now it’s true that we said we would stay on the job for as long as it took to get a deal done. But we learn what’s in store for us by the negotiations that take place before us. And we learn by the provocation that management is engaged in now that unless we show them it doesn’t work, that’s what we’ll be facing down the road. We don’t see the drivers as having gone out. We see them as locked out. Gerry Colangelo told me this morning that the first thing he did when he got to the plant last night was to propose that the matter of the driver who works the half day go to arbitration. Management said no. Then he proposed that the men who left their post be allowed back in. Management said no. That’s a dozen men fired for no other reason than being worried about a colleague.”
“Yeah, but that’s them, not us,” a guy Jamie recognized from Sunday Arts yelled from a seat in the middle of the room. He was a short, slender man in a tweed sports jacket, with thinning dark hair and plastic white frames that were too large for his narrow face.
“They’re the ones who Brady says are getting paid for shifts they don’t even work, and you know that’s true. They’re the ones Brady’s