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Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 by Tom Frank American liberals, even American radicals, have more in common with the Reagan right than they do with us. All of them, the whole bunch, are middle-class, Emersonian individualists. Emerson, Thoreau, all of these guys are scabs. Lane Kirkland is outside the American consensus in a way that even Abbie Hoffman never was. — Tom Geoghegan, Which Side Are You On? It's a Thursday afternoon in May, 1996, nearly ten months into the Detroit newspaper strike. The city's downtown, where the offices of the Detroit News and Free Press are located, is a dead zone of boarded-up skyscrapers, vacant lots, and empty streets with litter blowing randomly about. Down in the shadows in front of the Detroit News building, underneath the wall on which an inscription proclaims the paper an "Unrelenting foe of privilege and corruption," members of the six unions on strike against the News and the Detroit Free Press, joined by union workers from across the city, assorted city councilmen, and a smattering of religious figures, sing "Solidarity Forever" and watch as this week's volunteers block the entrance to the News's internal parking lot, undergo ritual removal by a squad of Detroit police, and get hauled off to jail. In the bright sunshine on the roof of the News building thirty feet above, professional strikebreakers from the Vance International security company look on. Were it not for their black uniforms, the thick-necked, sunglassed, and short-haired Vance guards could be actors from a beer commercial. They're certainly jolly enough: for them the union doings appear to be rich comic spectacle. They smirk and joke. They chew gum in uncanny synchronization, their powerful jaws moving up and down in unison. And although one of them occasionally lifts a video camera to capture the moment for company lawyers, they're mainly here to provide a living tableau of public indifference. It's not a coincidence that the most important labor struggle of the mid-90s is taking place in the information industries, and specifically within the smiling newspaper empires of Knight-Ridder and Gannett, genius publisher of both the Detroit News and USA Today. Labor is becoming invisible here, and the strikers know it. Most of them are Detroit lifers; many are second- and third-generation newspaper workers, with strong feelings about journalists' blue-collar social position. Talking with them below the photos of newspapermen past in the Anchor bar or at the offices of their pugnacious strike paper, the Detroit Sunday Journal, one begins to suspect that they are the last of the hardened, rooted, class-conscious species of journalists who defined American literature for most of the twentieth century; that the strike has, among its many other effects, served rather efficiently to weed people with exactly these ideas out of the journalistic workforce. Within a week after the strike began Gannett and Knight-Ridder management had replaced them with an army of footloose Gannettoids, interchangeable information workers who can be flown into any city on a moment's notice. While the scabs' city (and, naturally, labor) reporting leaves a bit to be desired, they have had few problems cranking out the lifestyle features that draw the gaze of suburban readers. In the glazed world that the info-conglomerates are building for their readers, the old newspaper workers serve about as much purpose as the buildings that once stood in the vacant lots across the street from the News offices. Class is disappearing from both journalistic workplace and the public culture of this most class-conscious city. Nine months later the strikers have made an offer to return to work unconditionally and newspapers around the country have quickly decided that the time is finally right to cover the Detroit newspaper strike. When it comes, though, their reporting is wrapped in a mythological package so uniform and so smugly confident of the direction in which civilization is heading that it reminds me of the black-clad Vance guards on the roof of the News building last summer, filming and chewing. Hear the new breed of journalists confront the big questions: What is labor? Why, labor is a relic of the deluded thirties. What are strikes? Why, strikes are sad. Tom Frank is the editor of The Baffler, a Chicago-based journal of cultural criticism. His first book, The Conquest of Cool, a critical history of advertising in the 1960s, was published this Fall. A prolific freelance journalist, Frank's writing appears online exclusively at Tripod. © 1998 Tom Frank. All Rights Reserved. Illustration by Federico Jordan Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3
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