Escalating its long-running contract dispute with management of The Register-Guard, the Eugene Newspaper Guild has issued a call to action for the paper’s subscribers: Cancel subscriptions.
Foreshadowing the contract negotiations that will resume this week, the guild asked subscribers to call the paper and cancel subscriptions Tuesday to show community support for the guild. And to prevent permanent damage to the paper’s circulation base, the guild requested those canceling subscriptions to call back Friday to restart delivery, a guild release stated.
Eugene Newspaper Guild President Suzi Prozanski, who is also a copy editor at The Register-Guard, said that as of Tuesday afternoon about 300 people had contacted the guild to cancel subscriptions for the week.
Newspaper management doesn’t “want to know how much community support we have,” Prozanski said. “And believe me, we have a lot.”
Publisher Tony Baker failed to return numerous calls from the Emerald, and Cynthia Walden, director of human resources at The Register-Guard, declined to discuss contract issues.
“I’m not prepared to answer any questions regarding this at this time,” she said. “We’re going to handle this at the bargaining table, not in the media.”
The Register-Guard’s circulation department failed to return calls by the Emerald requesting statistical information on cancelled subscriptions for the day.
The guild is made up of about 150 employees at The Register-Guard, including reporters, retail and classified advertising personnel, and workers in the circulation department, among others. Many members of the guild passed out fliers to friends and supporters asking them to cancel subscriptions.
Tuesday’s newspapers in The Register-Guard news boxes throughout Eugene were wrapped in a dummy front page criticizing the newspaper’s management in several satirical headlines and articles. “Contract Now” was typed in thick black letters over the Register-Guard masthead, and “Local Newspaper Gets Greedy” was the lead story of the dummy page.
While Prozanski said this was not a direct action of the guild, she assumed that the dummy covers were placed on the newspapers by a group supporting the guild’s efforts.
Much of the guild’s frustration has resulted from the dramatic changes in contract wording that have occurred in recent years. The Register-Guard hired Zinser and Patterson, a Nashville, Tenn., law firm, to serve as the paper’s legal counsel in the contract negotiations. Guild releases have labeled Zinser a “union-busting attorney.”
Prozanski said that The Register-Guard usually has lawyers representing the newspaper during bargaining sessions, but the move to bring an outside “union-busting” law firm into negotiations is a detour from tradition.
“It’s not just us that label him [a union buster],” Prozanski said. “He’s very proud of his record — he labels himself that.”
The law firm’s Web site lists many “significant victories” achieved in National Labor Relations Board cases, along with other state and federal cases. According to the Web site, “ZINSERANDPATTERSON limits its practice to the representation of management in the law of Labor and Employment.”
According to Prozanski, the time and location of bargaining sessions are withheld from the guild’s lead negotiators until the day of the negotiations. Prozanski reiterated that the guild believes the management has been negotiating in bad faith.
Contract disputes are not uncommon in the industry, said Tim Gleason, dean of the University’s School of Journalism and Communication, citing recent strikes and dissent at Seattle and Detroit newspapers.
Gleason said that issues of law and “good faith” are two separate areas, and while both sides claim to be in the right, each side has a biased opinion.
Issues that the guild is focusing its efforts on include salaries, base wage pay freezes, freedom of expression and personal e-mail use.