The newspaper publisher joke

It's a good joke, but you'll have to wait for it until the end of this post, which is about the labor troubles at The Times Union. The publisher there cancelled the union contract today. Here's his public perspective, which seems to me thoroughly disingenuous, and here's what The Albany Newspaper Guild has to say. But then I come with a bias, having helped organize The Post-Star in Glens Falls in the 1980s and chaired the Guild unit there (which was part of the Albany local). So, while acknowledging that the Internet, the recession and other economic and cultural forces may have doomed newspapers, I still stand in solidarity with the TU workers, many of whom I know. [Update: An April 22 companion piece to this post, about The Daily Gazette, can be found here.]  

I went to a couple of the Guild's national conventions back in the day, and met a local union leader there whose name I'm sorry to say I forget who became something of an inspiration to me. He was an old guy, a police reporter at the Wilkes-Barre Citizens' Voice, which was essentially a strike paper that went into permanent competition with the newspaper that had been struck. He was anti-abortion, which I liked, and we voted the same way on a losing amendment in committee (it's not all beer and skittles at those union jamborees), but that topic did not come up in his rousing address to the whole convention. He did tell this joke (I've updated the prices), which got a very big laugh from the assembled delegates:

A cannibal goes into his local restaurant and looks at the specials on the board. There's missionary stew for $11.95, fricasseed ivory trader for $12.95, witch doctor's special for $13.50, and newspaper publisher for $49.99. "Hey Cookie," says the cannibal. "I see you've got newspaper publisher on the menu again, but I can never afford it at that price. Why's it so expensive, anyway?"

"Well," says Cookie. "Did you ever try to clean one of those suckers?"

Comments

[ind_voter]

i wonder how much a politician would cost?

[Brian]

Hehe...

[Brian]

Perhaps you could explain how the management can unilaterally cancel the contract. I thought the whole point of a contract was to put binding obligations that could not be reneged upon without the consent of both/all parties. I find it hard to believe that the union would've agreed to a provision that would've allowed a unilateral cancellation. As a former union agitator :-), do you have any insight?

[Bob Conner]

TypePad
Hi Brian: The TU couldn't cancel the contract while it remained in force, but I believe it expired last year after negotiations failed to produce a new one. NYS public employees got the Taylor Law passed years ago, which prevents them from striking but also means key provisions of labor contracts stay in force after the contract expires, which in effect means the contracts never expire. But that is emphatically not true in the private sector, where I was regularly surprised at how little protection workers had under labor laws. I favored a bill that never got passed in the 1990s that would have prevented companies hiring permanent replecements in strikes, i.e. prevent them from in effect firing strikers. I still think that's the key reform labor needs, but I don't think it's addressed in the current card-check bill, about which opponents have raised legitimate objections and on which I am neutral.

[Brian]

Thanks for the clarification.