Читать книгу Cold Type - Harvey Araton - Страница 11

Chapter Five

Sandy Robbins was a roundish, smallish incongruity, unimposing except for a commanding baritone voice. Gray wisps above his ears and a few loose strands spared him total baldness. His oval-shaped face was embellished by a bushy mustache. His stubby arms and barrel chest made him look like the image of a small prehistoric creature in a children’s book.

The more benevolent likeness was Danny DeVito.

His tough talk never seemed to find its way into any new contract. The annual 1.5 percent raises he negotiated for the Trib’s editorial union—officially known as the Alliance of Editorial and Advertising Workers—drew collective sighs. He’d been called a weasel by disgruntled rank-and-filers for so many years that even he had to grudgingly answer to the handle Wheezy. Robbins maintained it dated to his days on the Trib’s advertising team when allergies could set him off on an extended sneezing seizure.

The truth was that most Alliance members understood the newspaper business was not thriving. Robbins would defend his work with heartfelt speeches at union meetings. “You have to understand that the most profitable papers are in cities that are only able to sustain one,” he had said when Jamie attended a recent meeting—for the first and only time. “This is the country’s most competitive market. The Trib is struggling. It was losing money for years with Maxine.”

Maxine Hancock was the matriarchal owner who had generally played by contract rules, even as she pinched pennies to keep her losses from getting out of hand. But this was the first contract showdown with Brady, whose anti-labor reputation preceded him. Every Trib union had been on edge.

“Sandy, explain one thing,” a voice called out from the back of the room. It was Paul Shapiro, the Trib’s Albany bureau chief. Shapiro lived in the woods between Saratoga and the state capital and looked the part. His dark wavy hair was worn shaggily long. His Smith Brothers beard needed serious grooming. An avid hunter and outdoorsman, Shapiro liked to chide his downstate colleagues as liberal gun control wimps and brag to them that he had the paper’s best assignment. When Jamie’s copy boy and clerk duties included answering phones, Shapiro would call in and ask, “How’s life in the cesspool?”

“The drivers walk out after everyone agrees that's the last thing we should do because the climate isn’t very good for a strike and no one wants to be out with the holidays coming up,” Shapiro said. “What I want to know is, are we talking about going out because they went out, or because we’ve reached an impasse in our own negotiations and think Brady won’t negotiate a fair contract with us?”

Robbins legitimized the question by nodding vigorously.

“Paulie, I know what you’re getting at, but let me say this. We have been without a contract now for six months and have had talks with Brady’s lawyer for nine. We’ve gotten nowhere on any of the pertinent issues. They did make one offer, as you know. It was so regressive on job security and guaranteed work hours that the negotiating committee was compelled to unanimously reject it.

“Now it’s true that we said we would stay on the job for as long as it took to get a deal done. But we learn what’s in store for us by the negotiations that take place before us. And we learn by the provocation that management is engaged in now that unless we show them it doesn’t work, that’s what we’ll be facing down the road. We don’t see the drivers as having gone out. We see them as locked out. Gerry Colangelo told me this morning that the first thing he did when he got to the plant last night was to propose that the matter of the driver who works the half day go to arbitration. Management said no. Then he proposed that the men who left their post be allowed back in. Management said no. That’s a dozen men fired for no other reason than being worried about a colleague.”

“Yeah, but that’s them, not us,” a guy Jamie recognized from Sunday Arts yelled from a seat in the middle of the room. He was a short, slender man in a tweed sports jacket, with thinning dark hair and plastic white frames that were too large for his narrow face.

“They’re the ones who Brady says are getting paid for shifts they don’t even work, and you know that’s true. They’re the ones Brady’s after, and they’re also the ones who run into the street as soon as something doesn’t go their way. They don’t represent our values as journalists. They’re a closed union shop, almost all white. Why do we even want to risk everything for those assholes?”

The room was stunned into momentary silence, followed by murmurs that quickly increased in quantity and volume into a collective expression of anti-driver sentiment. Someone yelled, “If we walk out, we’re committing professional suicide.” Another voice from somewhere on the side wall near Jamie groused, “This is all a goddamn setup.”

Jamie could feel a surge of passion from those who wanted no part of this. He, too, wanted to shed his veneer of neutrality, leap on top of this surge of politically incorrect passion, ride it right out the door and back to work. But he kept his opinion to himself.

From the row right in front of the original voice of dissent rose a shrill, “What the…?”

Carla Delgado wheeled in her seat, turning to stare down Sunday Arts.

“Let me tell you something, those assholes saved your pitiful ass four years ago. They supported you and everyone else in here when Maxine wanted to make all of us pay through the nose for our health insurance. Am I right?”

Sunday Arts frowned but obediently shook his head.

Carla, fueled by her access to expense accounts, wasn’t about to let the ingrate off the hook.

“And who the hell are you, Henry, to accuse people of stealing? I see the crap you run by every goddamned week. When was the last time you paid for dinner? How’d you like me to run back to the office right now and bring over a copy of that crap you turned in last year, a week in Bermuda doing some bullshit—what was it?—weekend getaways to fuck your bitch from the art museum?”

“Art museum?” someone along the wall snorted. “She looks like she’s from The Museum of Natural History.”

Carla sat back down, crossed her legs, pulled her black skirt closer to her knees and crossed her arms. The room grew quiet. The protest seemed successfully squelched by the office manager and Jamie’s emergency nurse.

Jamie thought, Damn, she is some piece of work. A good thing I kept my mouth shut.

Up in the front, he noticed Steven edging his way forward, placing something in Robbins’ hand while whispering in his ear. Robbins delightedly held up a security pass that buzzed employees into the Trib building during nighttime hours when there was no one manning the front desk in the lobby.

“Carla, I can tell you that you couldn’t just run back to the office,” Robbins said. He was grinning like the gap-toothed Letterman after another bland monologue joke.

“We had someone over at the building a couple of hours ago. These cards don’t work anymore. They’ve already installed a new security system. In effect, they’ve locked you out too. Since the Trib has taken a position of not wanting to negotiate a new contract with our union, I move that we officially are on strike, as of this morning.”

Jamie couldn’t believe it or didn’t want to believe it.

Half the people in here are reporters—and no one is going to at least ask who the source of this information is? This is such bullshit!

“Let’s show this bastard who we are,” Robbins yelled. He shook his fist and punched the air.

That was the last thing Jamie heard before he was caught in a tide of humanity pressing through the corridor, surging toward the street.

On the way through, to Jamie’s left, he spotted Blaine, pinned against the wall, the proverbial fly. In the midst of another long drag, holding the cigarette high to avoid setting fire to someone’s hair, he caught Jamie’s eye.

Blaine smiled, wickedly. He mouthed the words, “What did I tell you?”

Jamie didn’t respond. He only lamented that Blaine had been right—damn straight this is no fucking democracy. We didn’t even get a show of hands.

Needing no effort to move forward, Jamie felt as if he were floating on a raft, about to go over the falls. He was pushed along until he was out the front door, into the street, meeting the flash of cameras and the glare of television lights.

He recognized some reporters from other media outlets. One spotted him and called out his name. Too late, he was shepherded past and handed a cardboard picket sign by an Alliance member who had clearly been positioned before the meeting was over.

Jamie had a flashback to an awful night when a boy from down the street slept over and his striking father and uncle paraded around the apartment wearing picket signs on their heads with their pants down around their knees.

At least they had an excuse—they were drunk.

Feeling stiff, almost programmed, certainly silly, Jamie slipped the picket sign over his head without looking what was printed on the front. It might have said, “Kick me, I’m Unemployed,” but all he knew was what he felt: This string feels like a damn noose digging into my neck.

His tic got worse. If only he could spin his neck 180 degrees and exorcise himself from this fast-developing nightmare.