A day before the Wisconsin Senate approved what will almost certainly become a landmark right-to-work law, an old friend wrote a column about it.
It was a lament, really, a world-weary look at what is left of organized labor resistance to that rarest and most feared of all Wisconsin creatures — a Republican majority.
The writer, Jim Stingl, might very well have gotten away unscathed had he not tucked into the bottom of the column a personal admission.
“My own little corner of the private sector, the Journal Sentinel, has had a newsroom union with right-to-work rules since I started here in 1987,” Stingl wrote, meaning the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “I don’t believe I need the protection of a union for an occupation like mine, so I never joined the Milwaukee Newspaper Guild.”
In the funny way social media disseminates the news, I didn’t see the column at first, I saw the reaction to it. Jim Romenesko, whose jimromenesko.com has been must reading for news people for many years, posted the quote above, along with Stingl’s column mugshot.
“That’s right!” Romenesko wrote below Stingl’s blurb. “Job security is almost guaranteed for newspaper employees these days, so why the heck would they need a union?
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel award-winning columnist Jim Stingl wrote this piece just as Wisconsin journalists working for the state’s Gannett papers were getting laid off.”
Encouraged by the response to his post, Romenesko also invited people to double up on Stingl on Romenesko’s Facebook page. Commenters, many of whom I am sure are strangers to Stingl, referred to him as “stupid,” an “asshat” and an “entitled tool.”
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| John L. Lewis Photo courtesy of the John L. Lewis Archives |
Before I address all of what is wrong with Romenesko’s post and his band of latter-day Wobblies, a little disclosure is necessary. I have known and been a fan of Jim Romenesko for many years. I have written admiringly about his work.
I also came out of the newsroom where Stingl still plies his trade. I was around in the 1980s when the labor activists in the Milwaukee Journal and Milwaukee Sentinel newsrooms cranked up Local 51, the Milwaukee Newspaper Guild.
And like Stingl, I made a conscious decision not to join the union. Not because I believed a profession like mine didn’t need protection, but because I believed then and believe now that no one has the right to speak on my behalf in a transaction with an employer.
It takes a bladder full of gall to tell someone who has worked as hard to get where he’s gotten as Jim Stingl that he’s mooching off of a contract that requires an open shop to provide its benefits to workers whether they asked for them or not.
More preposterous is Romenesko’s suggestion that unions have been able to provide their memberships with the one benefit they’d prize above all others: job security. Ask the thousands of reporters and editors laid off in just the past decade what their unions were able to do to help them keep their jobs.
The howl you hear in the denunciations of Stingl is the howl of the union members Stingl heard in frigid Zeidler Park in Milwaukee two days before Senate vote on right to work. The anguish comes from deep inside people whose institutions — newspapers and organized labor — no longer command the same authority they once had in the marketplace.
Many of the survivors in both institutions refuse to make sense of, or learn from, this dissolution of power. Better to blame Stingl, or Republicans or rapacious capitalists in general. Meanwhile, the cruel, unfair and unjust world moves further and further away.
More than a decade ago, I was lucky enough to work with fellow Austin American-Statesman reporter Bill Bishop on a series of stories, Cities of Ideas. The series formed the basis for Bishop’s book, The Big Sort.
Bishop and I used data to help explain why cities like Austin, where I still live, become creative economic engines and why some cities, like Milwaukee, struggle.
In interview after interview, business leaders and entrepreneurs told me Milwaukee was mired in a 1950s view of the world, where heavy manufacturing, major metropolitan newspapers and labor unions were king.
Guy Mascari, who should have been a leading cheerleader as director of development for the cutting-edge Milwaukee County Research Park, told me bluntly, “I don’t expect Milwaukee’s economy to change for another 50 years.”
Commenters from Milwaukee let me know in colorful language how complete was the betrayal of my hometown. It took nearly 14 more years for political fortunes to change just enough to see if right-to-work fosters a business climate that will put more people to work.
Whether I believe it will or it won’t is to miss the point. However noble the intention, no self-appointed group has the right to interfere with the pursuit of employment by individuals, in Wisconsin or anywhere.
I’m not sure Stingl would agree with me or not. In an e-mail reply after I offered condolences for the attack on him, Stingl said he’d mentioned his own union experience for the sake of transparency. The Journal Sentinel editorial board had come out against the right-to-work law. He thought readers ought to know his newsroom had been operating under right-to-work for 30 years.
Stingl also offered something for the readers of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s coverage of right-to-work to consider. “Compared to a reporter who is in the union, I don’t know if that makes me more biased or less in writing on this topic.”
Given that Stingl’s worst lambasting came from people in his own profession, I believe I’ll let you decide.
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