Little to Cheer About

As F-16s zoomed in tight formation near my home recently, I directed my 6-year-old son’s attention skyward for a glimpse of the impressive war birds. Like most red-blooded American boys, he’s got a thing for loud, powerful machines—monster trucks, robots, motorcycles and the like.

But his gaze fixed on a sputtering biplane towing a long banner closer to Tierra firma. The sign made not-so-subtle reference to a local publisher as a “corporate pig.” My boy wanted to know what it all meant. “It’s a long story” was my short answer. Perhaps some day, if the appropriate opportunity presents itself, I’ll tell him the airborne banner was an advertisement, paid for by the Graphic Communications International Union Local 432-M, which represents disgruntled press workers—the people who spool the Volkswagen-size rolls of newsprint through the printing machines at The San Diego Union-Tribune.

(Full disclosure: I was the telecommunications reporter for the U-T during the short-lived dot-com era.)

I’ll tell my son that the GCIU was at war with U-T management for nearly a decade, upset that the publisher had refused to negotiate a labor contract over wages, health benefits and other issues.

I’ll tell him that, in a move against the union, management arranged a health plan in which workers were forced to pay rates 10 times higher than managers and supervisors elsewhere in the company.

I’ll tell him the National Labor Relations Board, as of the summer of 2002, had issued 24 unfair labor practice charges against U-T management for a variety of workplace transgressions.

I’ll also tell him the union merrily continued to shoot itself in the foot by engaging in an all-but-suicidal campaign to urge San Diego readers to cancel their subscriptions. Subscriptions dictate advertising rates. The higher the circulation, the more the paper can charge advertisers, ad revenue representing the financial lifeblood of any newspaper. As for the biplane flyovers, they were merely sophomoric expressions—sad flights of impotent rage.

How much that campaign hurt the pressroom workers’ cause or the newspaper’s advertising and circulation may never be known. A new three-year contract between the U-T and the union—one neither side was particularly ecstatic about—was finally due to be signed as this issue of San Diego Magazine went to press. The decade-long road to an unhappy compromise contract provides ample illustration that San Diego’s unions, like the biplanes that tow those banners, are loud but weak machines these days—able to draw attention but enfeebled against the headwinds of contemporary reality. Where once unions were the first line of defense to protect workers from predatory and exploitative companies, today’s information-age employees are more mobile, much more informed and, in short, more empowered to protect their own interests than their counterparts in the mid-20th century.

This Labor Day, organized labor has little to cheer about. Membership in labor unions in the United States reached an all-time high in the 1950s, when about 40 percent of the workforce belonged to unions. Today, union membership is about 14 percent of the working population—and falling.

Locally, labor’s waning power was thrust into sharp relief this summer, when the San Diego City Council—behind closed doors—briefly bent to union interests and floated an ill-conceived provision requiring SeaWorld to employ only union labor to construct the park’s proposed $50 million expansion.

Put aside arguments that the expansion, with its 300-room hotel and amusement splash-down rides, has little to do with the park’s ostensible mission to educate and showcase the majesty of marine life. Put aside, as well, SeaWorld’s threat to kill the expansion if forced to hire union labor, thus pulling the plug on a $15 million project to improve roads and other infrastructure around Mission Bay. After all, SeaWorld parent Anheuser-Busch Entertainment Inc. makes no secret that it needs the expansion to lure more visitors and boost revenue. The St. Louis–based beer giant could ill-afford to neglect the crown jewel in its chain of theme parks.

Although the federal government can and does mandate racial quotas when hiring contractors for federal projects, the city council had no such authority. That was quickly revealed when business interests, a vocal block of the citizenry and, yes, the Union-Tribune blasted the back-room proviso for the special-interest giveaway that it was. About 25 percent of San Diego contractors are union signatories. Had the council pushed through its quixotic agenda, a vast percentage of non-union contractors would have been forbidden to work on the second-largest construction project in the city limits—second only to the Padres’ downtown ballpark.

The council, to its credit, quickly retreated, and SeaWorld will build its thrill rides and hotel—perhaps with union labor, perhaps without. As a private enterprise, that’s its choice to make, not the city’s.

The U-T fretted in its editorial that the council’s initial position heralded “the growing power of organized labor in San Diego.” Nothing could be further from the truth. All the paper’s oracles had to do was look around the third floor of the U-T newsroom, where, four years ago, members of Newspaper Guild Local 95—which included reporters and advertising, circulation, finance and business departments—took a vote to decertify the guild. That’s right—to voluntarily bail out from the union.

At the time, Linda Foley, president of the Washington, D.C.–based guild, called the defeat “the largest in memory.” Growing labor power, indeed.

Perhaps those on the editorial board had bought into propaganda from local unions, which two years ago took credit for electing “five pro-working-family members to the nine-member San Diego City Council.”

If my son ever asks what electing five pro-working-family members to the council means, I’ll tell him it means this isn’t Chicago in the 1950s. It’s San Diego in the new millennium.
San Diego’s unions, like the biplanes that tow those banners, are loud but weak machines these days—able to draw attention but enfeebled against the headwinds of contemporary reality.

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