posted 2007/03/08 at 23:28
[Reminder: My birthday is in ten days. Have you bought me a present off of my Amazon.com wishlist yet? You know you want to ... ]
It's been a while since I posted an update on the situation with our local newspaper, the Toledo Blade. The Blade is one of the few big city papers that's still locally owned and operated, and of course I'm all for local media. Unfortunately, in the case of the Blade, I went to the same school that the owners of the paper sent their kids to, so I know the family, and thus I know why no one really wants the paper.
Anyway, over six months ago some Blade employees were locked out since the owners of the paper basically decided to go all Wal-Mart on the unions and tried to get the employees to sign a new contract which would divest their unions of pretty much all their bargaining power. This would be bad enough in and of itself, but the same family that owns the Blade also owns our local cable company, and they decided to start airing anti-union commercials in pretty much every local commercial break on every channel. I swear not an hour went by without at least two commercials talking about why the only reason Toledo's economy is so bad is because the unions prevent companies from making "a fair profit."
About a month ago, though, things changed. The family's still running commercials for the Blade (which I don't think they ever did before the leadup to the lockout), but the commercials just feature scabs, identified as "Replacement Workers" on the chyrons, talking about how wonderful working at the paper is, without talking about how bad the unions are. My first thought was that some judge somewhere ruled that it was unfair for the owners of the paper and cable company to take advantage of their dominance in the Toledo media market, but I can't find any news stories about that anywhere. Perhaps the hardcore anti-union propaganda just backfired on them and they toned down their rhetoric. Whatever the case, I just wish this lockout would end soon and the paper would let its employees go back to work there at decent wages with union protection.
I did find one pro-union Website devoted to the struggle, stoptheblade.com, but I haven't found any pro-ownership Websites. I can't even find any real mention of the lockout on toledoblade.com. Now that I've said something about that, though, watch them put up a Website in the next couple of days or so.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon