Seyfarth Shaw LLP partner Michael Rybicki began his talk at the Key Executives Mega-Conference in Fort Worth Feb. 19 by saying he didn’t want to sound like he thought the sky was falling — but then proceeded to sound pretty apocalyptic about the extent of union organizing in the newspaper industry today.
“I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little, but I can tell you there has never been the level of union drives in the newspaper industry in my over 40 years than there has been today,” said Rybicki, whose practice focus is on representing management and companies in labor issues.
What’s especially frightening — at least from a publisher’s point of view — is that unions themselves barely have to do any organizing, he said.
“What is unique about organizing activity today is the extent to which newsrooms are reaching out to the Newspaper Guild … rather than the union reaching out to newsrooms,” Rybicki said. “Your newsroom may be talking about union organization, and you may not know anything about it.”
And, in fact, more newspapers are getting blindsided by organizing drives. Newspapers such as The Los Angeles Times, which Rybicki characterized as historically “extremely anti-union” with a newsroom that never felt the need for representation, went union virtually overnight.
Among other unlikely newspapers published in states mostly hostile to unions that now have unionized newsrooms: The Missoula (Montana) Independent and the Caspar (Wyoming) Star-Tribune. They joined other high-profile newspapers organized in the last year or so, including the Chicago Tribune, Omaha World Herald, The Virginian-Pilot, Hartford Courant and The Morning Call in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
“What we see are activities that are going on at newsrooms where if someone had said, ‘Michael, do you see these newsrooms being organized in 10 years?’, I would have said no,” Rybicki said.
Just as surprising to many in the industry is the role that millennials are playing in these organizing drives. For most of their still-young adult lives, this demographic cohort has been considered too independent, too tech-savvy, too unattached to any company and just too, well, self-involved to be interested in unions their grandfathers might have belonged to.
“All those confident positions about millennials were all wrong,” Rybicki said. “Millennials are at the forefront of organizing efforts.”
Those digital skills? That enthusiasm of youth? Millennials are bringing those traits to union organizing — and beating the Boomers who are stuck with anti-union arguments and tactics that don’t work on them.
A mix of issues both new and familiar are behind this record rate of organizing, Rybicki told the Mega-Conference:
“There’s a big new issue, and it kind of bundles up all of these issues: that’s the issue of status quo,” Rybicki said. “Unions can tell newsrooms: While we’re talking, the company has to maintain the status quo, and what that means is no layoffs until we have an equitable agreement on pay, etc.”
Among the warning signs that a union drive is underway is silence. The grapevine goes dead, and managers are not hearing what’s going on in the newsroom. Another is the emergence of new informal newsroom leaders. Perhaps the most glaring warning sign, according to Rybicki, is staff interaction with Guild-represented journalists from other newspapers, on news assignments or at conventions.
The best response is to maintain communications, encourage and be responsive to feedback, and to be aware of employee perceptions of fairness in the workplace.
“The confident prediction that unions are going away was wrong,” Rybicki said. “I can tell you the unions themselves are amazed at their success. So be afraid of union organizing. I have been with people who never thought their” newsrooms would organize.
