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NRJ Book: Newsworkers Unite: Labor, Convergence, and North American Newspapers

Newsworkers Unite: Labor, Convergence, and North American Newspapers, by Catherine McKercher (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, $75 hard cover, $27.95 paperback) 232 pages.Reviewed by Marc EdgeThe recent trends toward increasing concentration of press ownership and technological convergence of media have served to put organized labor at a disadvantage. Concentration has resulted in larger, more diversified media corporations, which are often powerful international conglomerates. These employers have proven ever more formidable adversaries across the bargaining table due to their increased and more centralized resources. Convergence has served to eliminate whole categories of labor and to create additional opportunities for corporate cost-cutting across media.These phenomena have been well documented from an industry standpoint, but less attention has been paid by scholars to their effect on media workers. The unions, however, notably The Newspaper Guild (TNG) and the International Typographical Union (ITU), took notice early on of these threats to their very existence. As a result, furious efforts ensued to form strategic alliances aimed at self-preservation. But unlike the cold economic logic that usually governs corporate mergers and takeovers, labor unions are subject to often fractious politics, which can make such matters unpredictable at best.The result has made for a fascinating study by Canadian media scholar Catherine McKercher, the title of which is not the exhortation it seems at first glance but rather a well-documented account of recent union consolidation. An important chapter of labor history, it is packed with such primary sources as interviews with many of the union officials involved. It lacks only a glossary to aid the uninitiated in keeping track of the seemingly endless acronyms. An associate professor in the School of Journalism at Carleton University in Ottawa, McKercher's position north of the border allows for an interesting perspective to her study. The Canadian locals of the media unions, in addition to seeking security, also often sought a measure of autonomy from the American influence which historically dominated them. Answering "the Canadian question" in the second half of her book thus results in a study as much of nationalism as of media and labor convergence. From there, McKercher narrows her focus even further, to examine the forced convergence of labor at Pacific Press in Vancouver on Canada's west coast. The case study makes for a fitting climax to McKercher's research, which is an updated version of her humanities dissertation, completed in 2000 at Concordia University in Montreal.A former newspaper journalist, McKercher provides a useful history of newspaper unions by tracing the 18th Century origins of the craft guilds that comprised the first unions of printers in London and New York in the days when typesetter and editor were often one. The National Typographical Union formed in 1850 became the ITU soon thereafter when Canadian printers were admitted, but the process quickly became one of divergence instead, with pressmen, photoengravers and journalists breaking away from the ITU to form separate unions. By 1960, however, the looming technological changes that threatened to make the work of compositors redundant through the use of computer technology led many in the ITU to conclude that it had been a mistake to allow their co-workers to break away. …