By Dan MacLeod

At the outset, it seems like a simple story.

After a long struggle, a newly unionized paper does everything it can to work out a contract with a Canadian Charles Foster Kane. And, true to character, the publishing mogul reacts with contempt. The paper is the Calgary Herald, and the bad guy is Conrad Black.

And bad he is. The Alberta Labor Relations Board has ruled management is not negotiating in good faith. Reporters have been on strike for nearly half a year. Black continues to publish via scab labor, giving away thousands of copies to offset diminishing circulation. He's said outright that the strike will be "resolved by decertification of the union in two years' time or by employees coming back to work without a contract." This is a man who has said of the press: "A very large number of them are ignorant, opinionated, intellectually dishonest and inadequately supervised."

Conrad The Black
It is no exaggeration to think of Orson Welles when describing the man who sued Prime Minister Jean Chrčtien for abuse of power last year. (Chrčtien refused to let Black sit in Britain's House of Lords while retaining Canadian citizenship.) Conrad Black sues anybody who impedes on his sense of self; he once had seven defamation cases in court at the same time. According to Chris Dornan, head of Carleton University's journalism school, Black responds to attacks "publicly, permanently and without quarter."

As a media baron, he may have outdone even William Randolph Hearst. Black not only owns 54 Canadian papers (60 percent of the country's readership), he also owns more than 200 in the U.S. and Australia, as well as London's Daily Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post. And Black has no qualms about using his owner's clout in his papers' pages. For example, when the Roman Catholic bishop of Calgary came out in defense of the striking Herald workers, Black wrote (in that paper's April 4th edition): "In the Leninist terminology which would be familiar to the strike leaders, [Bishop Henry] has made himself a perfect 'useful idiot' to them. … If your jumped-up little twerp of a bishop thinks I'm not a very good Catholic, I think he's a prime candidate for an excorcism (sic)."

Black is an upper-class kid who got thrown out of the elite Upper Canada College for copying and selling exam questions. He flunked out of equally elite Osgoode Hall law school a few years later. His dad was an entrepreneur who rubbed shoulders with Canada's rich and famous and later left his son a business empire.

On the other hand, you've got to give him credit. Suddenly no longer a law student, he accepted a college friend's offer to manage a rural Quebec paper. Black virtually wrote the thing himself while selling advertising and drumming up subscriptions full-time. He not only turned the operation around, he learned French that same year and got himself accepted at the Université Laval law school. This time he graduated at the top of his class.

In 1969, when Black was 25, he and two friends bought a second English-language paper in Quebec for $20,000. They cut production costs, fought the newsroom on matters both economic end editorial, and waged an aggressive campaign for advertising revenue. Twelve years later, the Sherbrooke Record was worth $20 million.

Black continues to snatch up papers in prairie towns like Regina and Saskatoon. When he takes over, he doesn't lose any time in firing people. Says union organizer Dave Wilson, "The day after he bought those papers — the next day — they fired 25 percent of the employees. Gone, just like that!" Wilson is trying to hammer out a first-time contract with Black's Southam Corp. at the Regina Leader-Post. Last month, management showed its good faith by installing spy cameras in the newsroom. This is illegal in Saskatchewan, which is, after all, the province where Canada's socialized medicine system was born. (The spy cameras were removed after their discovery.) "In Regina, it's not so bad," says Wilson. "Both sides submit to an arbitrator, and both sides agree in advance to accept the ruling."

But the Herald strike (which doesn't involve Wilson's union) is taking place in the province next door, Canada's version of Texas. Not to put too fine a point on it, but Alberta is a gun-toting, bible-thumping, right-to-life, wish-we-had-the-death-penalty kind of place. There's no anti-scab law.

In a country where thousands of journalists have lost their jobs in the past few years, a country where unemployment has hovered around 15 percent for a decade, it should come as no surprise that scabs exist. And it shouldn't surprise anybody that Conrad Black will use any means he can to win any fight he's in. The Herald union, however, seems amazed at what's happening.

Doing It To Ourselves...
One of the refreshing things about living in Canada is that there's so little violence. So seeing the rogues' gallery of scabs at heraldunion.com didn't send the same shiver that Web site snapshots of U.S. "abortionists" do. While some of the photos were taken through car windows from picket lines, a lot feature people at parties, winking and grinning and holding up bottles. These are the former co-workers who've refused to join the strike. One is a retired photographer who, the caption reads, "fought long and hard to get his package and pension when he left the Herald after 30 years of service. Seems he's forgotten all his friends and the wonderful media send-off at his retirement party, so he decided to come back and SCAB."

The people who put this display together appear to be nothing if not naive. Or maybe it's outrage at the fact that, although they're fighting the good fight, chances are excellent they'll lose.

Black is perfectly able to keep the Herald presses running for another 18 months. He's drawn his line in the sand and, barring a miracle by Bishop Henry's boss, it's doubtful he'll change his mind.

Also, he's not stupid. Contract-renewal talks at the Black-owned Ottawa Citizen are going fine. Dave Wilson, who's part of that negotiating team as well, says none of the basic issues (seniority, pay scale, freedom of journalists to report what they see) are up for discussion. "The Citizen's had a union for 51 years, and it's a high-profile paper," Wilson points out. Conrad Black may get into far too many pissing-matches but he has the business sense not to lose more than he can afford.

Whereas, come December when it's -40° in Calgary and the wind is howling across the plains, the strikers will have been out on the line for over a year. They'll know their kids will be disappointed on Christmas morning. People who were making $55,000 a year get $300 a week in strike pay. A few at a time, the members will begin to doubt. Especially since some 30 percent of pre-strike employees are already crossing the picket lines, and it's only April.

The only hope for the Herald Union is a word from another era (unless you're Polish). That solidarity is an increasingly relative and even dubious concept is partly a result of the new world order of economics. But in Canadian journalism (probably true of journalism in all industrialized countries), the unions have done far more damage to themselves than any team of egomaniacal, fat-cat financiers/entrepreneurs/industrialists could ever do.

In addition to photos of the Herald workers who refused to strike, the union Web site gives thumbnail descriptions of the scabs who've been hired from outside. A lot of them are former part-timers or freelancers or contractual workers with no job security. These are the workers the various media unions chose not to represent over and over again in the past 40 years.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has been a kind of pseudo-lefty haven since the '60s, for example, yet an impressive array of in-house unions has consistently avoided representing the thousands of freelancers and contractual workers who've graced Canada's public airwaves over the past two generations.

In fact, the CBC and French-language Radio-Canada are closed shops. This means freelancers and contractual employees are welcome to come in and lighten the workload as long as they pay union dues. In some cases, they pay double the normal amount. However, they get nothing back in the way of job protection, something that's reserved for "permanent" staff. You can be a "contractual" for years and years and never actually get into the club. Freelancers and contractuals are even made to pay into group pension funds of which they're not a part and from which they draw no benefits.

It's hard to explain a newsroom where people whose jobs are "protected for life" don't protest when full-time colleagues — the guy or gal at the next desk, somebody they eat lunch with — are summarily fired every five months in order to prevent them from becoming permanent employees, then rehired the next day. Management's desire to reverse the tide on permanent status is understandable. Unions accepting conditions where younger workers are permanently left in limbo isn't. Yet this attitude has prevailed for over 20 years and in public broadcasting, no less.

In the private sector, four years ago some 20 regular contributors discovered that the Montreal Gazette was re-selling their material. Since most of this was Internet-driven, the freelancers demanded e-rights, a phenomenon that is occurring at many other papers, including the New York Times. Media management reaction was as unanimous as Senate testimony by the tobacco industry. The individuals were threatened, then fired; new freelancers were hired to do the same columns (in a word, scabs). Once again, unionized reporters — people who share the same pages — didn't raise a voice in protest.

Now they do. Union reps Dave Wilson and Jan Ravensbergen both told me that freelancers were definitely an issue today, and that when people do the same job on a regular basis they deserved to be treated the same. Both were honest enough to say that in the past, unions had seen freelancers and contractual workers as a kind of enemy. Now they're trying to "bring everybody into the fold" but management is fighting them tooth and nail.

Is The Future Black?
Will Straw, head of McGill's graduate journalism program (it doesn't have a J-school), suggests that Black's master plan may be one newsroom for all the Southam papers in the country. And why stop in Canada? Any reason to think he wouldn't do the same thing with his other papers around the world? Carleton's Chris Dornan published a piece on that subject several years ago, in which he asked why anyone in his right mind would pay 10 or 12 different people $55,000 a year each to write film critiques for a national chain of papers. As he told me on the phone, "I mean, they're reviewing the same movies …"

On the union side, they're talking about a world where everyone is a freelancer. Dave Wilson says, "That's Conrad Black's dream!" and is only half kidding.

The two visions complement each other quite nicely. One newsroom to feed 50 papers. Ten-bucks-an-hour stringers to cover local sports in towns across the country. A few secretaries to access things like obits and police blotters. An out-of-work reporter — or maybe an acquaintance's kid — to cover City Hall for $600 a week. It'll pass for a paper.

The World According to Black is not only both one newsroom and an army of insecure freelancers, but probably things we haven't yet dared to imagine. Still, his cards are on the table. We know what he thinks, where he wants to go, and just how far he's willing to go.

So unions should be advised. And the Herald strike is probably a good place to start. Maybe Ottawa, Montreal and other papers in the chain should lend a hand to their poor-bastard brethren in Calgary.

Union president Andy Marshall says, "Our seniority clause is only about salary, not promotions …" I can hear him shake his head in disbelief over the phone. "This is all basic stuff at any unionized paper. One clause is that the employer 'agrees to treat employees respectfully and equitably.' It's a standard anti-harassment clause, and they won't even agree to that!"

Media unions across the country should take note, but I bet they don't.

The future isn't written in stone. Conrad Black launched a national paper a little over a year ago, and he's been losing something like $700,000 a week since. He doesn't appear to be worried about it. He's giving away free copies hand over fist to boost circulation figures, which, in turn, affect ad rates. Except that all the other papers in the Southam chain have suffered cutbacks to make up those losses.

For Carleton University's Chris Dornan, the success or failure of the National Post will be the deciding factor in the Conrad Black story. Our Canadian hero may yet go down in flames.

But I bet he doesn't.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

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