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Cathy Schwegmann traveled to Bloomington in May and
stood on the sidewalk outside the offices of Iowa-based Lee
Enterprises’ The Pantagraph, chatting with employees and handing out surveys. In a few brief hours, employees say, she changed the
internal dynamics of the 47,000-daily-circulation Pantagraph. A full-fledged unionization campaign is now taking
place in Bloomington, where organizing-committee members are working to
collect signed authorization cards, the first in a series of steps that the
National Labor Relations Board requires of prospective bargaining units.
Schwegmann, organizing coordinator for the St. Louis Newspaper Guild
— which represents workers of Lee’s flagship, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, purchased
in 2005 from Pulitzer Inc. — says that as many as 175 workers could
sign up at the Bloomington newspaper alone. “So many workers at so many [Lee Enterprises]
newspapers are being affected by decisions made in Davenport,”
Schwegmann says. With Bloomington as the movement’s epicenter,
an effort has been under way ever since to organize employees at
Lee’s three largest Illinois publications, including The Southern Illinoisan in
Carbondale and the Herald & Review in Decatur (the company also runs the Times-Courier in Charleston and the Journal Gazette in
Mattoon). Lee, which owns 55 daily newspapers and 300 weeklies
in 23 states, mostly in the Midwest and west of the Rocky Mountains,
doesn’t seem to like the unionization effort one little bit. “I don’t have a comment about anything
like that,” says Dan Hayes, Lee’s vice president of corporate
communications. A Lee-operated Web site, www.leeunionfree.com, is
even more overtly hostile to organized labor, stating that unions work
against the best interests of employees, customers, and company. One company statement reads: “As a result of
acquisitions in recent years, we have gained many fine employees who are
represented by a bargaining agent, and we’re glad to have them in
Lee. “Where union representation exists, we intend
to honor agreements and negotiate in good faith. Elsewhere across our
company, we hope you will join us in continuing to resist the introduction
of unions as an unnecessary impediment to maintaining a creative, rewarding
and successful workplace.”
Bloomington workers have posted a site of their own,
at www.pantagraphunion.org, where employees are able to fire salvos at the
paper’s brass — especially former publisher Linda Lindus, who
left in November — under the cloak of anonymity. “The company has shown that they will target
people for discipline for speaking out,” says Schwegmann. For that reason, she declines to discuss a timeline
for holding elections and initiating negotiations with managers: “People put a lot on the line when they form a
union, so I try to be respectful to that.”
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com
This article appears in Dec 13-19, 2007.
