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Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3 The Chicago Tribune's version, which appeared on page one on February 24, 1996 is positively at war with the idea of causality. It introduces its readers to the subject not by discussing the issues at stake but with a soft-focus enumeration of "the often-overlooked wounds when labor and management can't agree." There's a certain "complexity of emotions" brewing in Detroit, including "bitterness," "anguish," and an occasional bright patch of understanding (of strikers for scabs, naturally). The Strikes Are Sad theme permits the Tribune writer all sorts of personal-relationship metaphors. "Friendships have been broken," he notes. He likens the struggle to "a troubled marriage, where both spouses have said too many damaging things to simply forgive." He quotes a striker who says that "'people have become like enemies.'" The article even ends with these statements of random cosmic misfortune: "'It's a real tragedy,'" and "'Why did it have to happen here?'" Since the Detroit newspaper strike was just a bit of bad luck for both sides, neither the means by which management forced its employees to the wall nor the immediate issues that precipitated the walkout back in the summer of 1995 are important enough to merit more than one sentence in the Tribune's accounting. Other facts have to go unremarked altogether: that Gannett is a notoriously anti-union employer regardless of what city they're in; that newspaper management has often boasted about what the strike has allowed them to accomplish; that Detroit civic leaders, including the mayor and the archbishop, have been outspoken on the side of labor in this dispute; and that the whole thing was only made possible by one of those legislative gifts that the federal government has been showering on media conglomerates for the last ten years (in this case the "Newspaper Preservation Act," which was interpreted in 1989 in such a manner as to permit a Joint Operating Agreement, or federally-sanctioned monopoly, between the two competing papers). So sanitized is this species of labor reporting that when the Tribune writer finally decides to flex his head and do some analysis, the best he's able to come up with is that favorite of indeterminacy fans everywhere, a series of "contradictions" (one of the Detroit papers was pro-labor before the strike; management often said it was against something that it actually wasn't; though the strike is supposed to be over, it really isn't), none of which are even marginally confusing to anyone who's followed the story. The Tribune's desire to deny the Detroit events' larger significance is almost palpable — and it's an especially interesting maneuver given the Trib's own union-busting past. But the Tribune didn't invent this kind of journalism. To describe labor conflicts as personal, unhappy, but fundamentally without causes that outsiders can understand is simply the way we think about the subject these days. "Strikes are sad" is an industry standard, like "Eternal China" and the curious notion that the Balkan states have been at war basically forever. So meaningful to culture-industry management is the strike-as-heartbreak narrative that it has already become a centerpiece myth in the great showplace of consensus: advertising. "Strike Break" (no kidding, that was really its title), the Pizza Hut commercial that ran during the Super Bowl in 1994, presents the now-orthodox vision of organized labor so concisely and realistically that, were it not for its more-conspicuous-than-usual product placement, the ad could easily be substituted for TV news strike coverage. The scene: anyconflict, USA. Outside the plant striking blue-collar exotics wave signs and hubbub noisily. Up in their offices beleaguered managers, like the concerned parents of a runaway teenager, wait for the workers to come to their senses. "I thought we were friends," one executive moans. Not to worry, sir! By having a Pizza Hut delivery truck intervene with a cache of hot pies for his disgruntled employees out on the picket line, he is able to salvage the situation. Everyone knows how going on strike can build up a real hunger, right? And sure enough, the workers drop their flimsy "On Strike" signs in a rush for the pizzas, then look up gratefully to the benevolent corporate provider in the window above. Who needs negotiations, contracts, or unions themselves when friendship, the glue that really holds industry together, can be reaffirmed at the cost of a few pizzas? The labor movement may be awakening from its Cold War coma, but in terms of the nation's official myths it might just as well have gone on sleeping forever. In the millennial cyber-dreaming of the businessman's republic, labor's critique, with all its intimations about social class and workplace democracy, no longer makes sense. For contemporary American media-makers, complacent with an almost unprecedented world-historical self-assurance, the market is the only appropriate matrix for understanding human affairs. Business is life; management is government; markets are democracy; entrepreneurs are artists. And the more directly these principles are stated the better. Using a style only slightly less propagandistic than the official art of Stalinist Russia, serious journalists join with TV commercials to lead us in worship of the great executives. It is speculators, mutual-fund managers, and Federal Express, we are told, who create wealth, and the business pages teem with tales of wise blue collar investors who have accepted the market for the universal prosperity-machine that it is and have transferred their faith from union to broker. Page 1 - Page 2 - Page 3
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