The Holdout

All but one of the Globe's unions have agreed to swallow big cuts to keep the paper's New York overlords from killing it off. But for Dan Totten, bellicose boss of the biggest labor group, the battle is far from over. Is he the defender the Globe needs? Or an overmatched hack who'll speed its demise? We're all about to find out.

Guild vice president Scott Steeves goes further. New to the negotiating process, the newsroom members failed to see the job guarantees as the valuable bargaining chips they are, he says. There was a reason the union’s playbook wasn’t e-mailed to members. “It’s posturing a lot of the time, and the membership doesn’t understand that. And because they’re news people, because they’re reporters, they want every little detail and every little fact,” Steeves says. “And it hurts negotiations if we give our game plan away to them because then, next thing you know, you see it in the Herald, it’s online, it’s all over the place.

“We were always willing to discuss everything [with the Times Company], but we didn’t want to say that to start off negotiations…I absolutely think [the newsroom complaints] weakened our position because the company knew that there was a big group of non-job-guaranteed people who were pressuring the negotiating team to give up the job guarantees without knowing how the process works.”

What Steeves and Totten needed, then, was their membership’s blind faith—a trust that they were getting the job done behind closed doors. Considering the newsroom’s unfamiliarity with the union, and the union’s inability to communicate with its members, it’s little wonder they did not receive it. Totten says he understands he made some mistakes and is working to correct them. A more unified guild, he believes, will give him a better bargaining position. But should the negotiations restart, his tenor is one thing that won’t change. Being of the old breed, he’s a puncher, not a conciliator. “I am who I am,” he says. “I don’t think a lighter tone would have accomplished anything. I think you need to press on behalf of the people who might not understand strategies.”

 

Despite feeling that dissenting members had weakened their hand, Totten and Steeves strode into the negotiations on April 14 committed to playing the guarantees for all they were worth. Across the table sat Gregory Thornton, the Globe‘s labor czar; Bernard Plum, the Times Company lawyer sent up from New York; and three other Globe higher-ups. During past labor negotiations, Thornton had been management’s point man. But as union leaders settled into the basement conference room of the Sacred Heart school in Weymouth, where a friendly labor group rents space, they soon realized that Plum would be the Times Company’s lead player. This time, New York, not Boston, was calling the shots.

A labor specialist from the high-powered firm Proskauer Rose, Plum showed little emotion at the bargaining table. “He’s got a straightforward, no-nonsense style,” Steeves says. “Here it is, this is what it is. No massaging it at all. It’s the bottom line, that’s what we need, we’re gonna get it, period.” Determined to remain a single, faceless entity throughout the negotiations, Plum and his cohorts took pains to avoid individual media attention. They entered and exited the talks through a back door, and shooed away photographers when they were spotted.

Totten presented a contrast in style. “Dan’s more passionate,” says Steeves. “He’s always saying, you know, ‘This is wrong, you gotta stand up for people, you can’t just destroy people’s lives like this, people’s retirement, people’s 401(k). How are people supposed to send their kids to school and pay their mortgage?'”

 

As the Times Company’s May 1 deadline approached, the pace of negotiations intensified. The closer it got, the more the threat to shutter the paper seemed like just bluster, a leverage tactic. When the date came and went without a settlement, it became clear that Totten had called the Times Company’s bluff. “It was calculated; it was part of our strategy,” Totten says now. From the beginning, he was of the belief that “it doesn’t benefit the Sulzbergers to close [the paper].” Of course, that hadn’t stopped Totten from using the threat to galvanize all the public support he could, launching a campaign—which included radio ads and an April 24 “Save the Globe” rally at Faneuil Hall—to vilify the New York overlords.

Totten may have gotten his opponents to blink when it came to shutting down the paper, but the Times Company had another trump card—one that it still holds today. If Plum and his bosses in New York concluded that the talks had broken down, they could declare an impasse, a legal step that would allow the Times Company to impose its final contract offer, which they indicated would include a devastating 23 percent wage cut. Such a deep cut would easily get the Times Company to its $10 million target—while of course irreparably demoralizing its Globe employees in the process. But because the management negotiators were keeping such a good poker face, Totten had no way of knowing whether that fact much mattered to the Times Company.

With the 23 percent cut now in play, the talks dragged late into the night of May 5. The only thing the parties could agree on, it appeared, was Chinese food: At 9:30 a box of it (containing separate bags for union and management) was hauled in. The two sides remained holed up in the negotiating room until 12:45 a.m., when Totten began conducting occasional sidebars in the hallway. For most of these, he leaned coolly against the wall. But at 3 a.m., when he stepped into the hall with Thornton, his demeanor had changed. Totten paced back and forth. Swinging out his left fist, he banged the wall. He paced some more. The two were out of earshot, but it was apparent that an unwelcome conclusion was close at hand.

Thirty minutes later, Totten trudged up a small staircase to greet reporters waiting for him on a landing. He looked exhausted, the news cameras’ lights revealing glazed, watery eyes. Taking no questions and divulging few details, he explained that he had a proposal to put before his members. There would be no impasse—not tonight, anyway. People assumed a deal had been struck and the Globe saved. They were wrong.

 

If it were up to him, Dan Totten would still be locked in that Weymouth basement, hammering away. It took a heated argument with Steeves that night, in fact, to convince him to fold his hand and bring the Times Company’s offer to the union members.

Back in the conference room in the guild’s Quincy office, he’s still seething. “So the New York Times’ position is, Accept this, or take a 23 percent wage cut. Which, by the way, went from 22 and a quarter percent to 23 percent,” he says. “That was a very hostile act, just mean-spirited, in and of itself.”

While Totten blames the onerous terms on Times Company vindictiveness, some of his own members wonder if much of the fault doesn’t rest with Totten himself, as architect of a cutthroat strategy. In this take, his stubbornness and guns-blazing style drove the Times Company toward draconian measures. “I think with different leadership we could have had a better deal,” says one Globe reporter. “The tenor of the negotiations were unnecessarily ugly, and I think that some of the bad blood and kind of rote hostility is counterproductive.”

That’s impossible to know, but it’s hard to believe things could have turned out much worse for the guild. After all, in the end the Times Company got everything it wanted.

Well, almost everything. One consequence of the proposal was that it was so loathed by guild members that even those who resent Totten shifted their anger toward the Times Company. If the New Yorkers had hoped to break the guild, that ambition failed. Instead, pulled together in an unlikely moment of unity, some members are talking of voting down the proposal and sending Totten once more back into the negotiation room—even despite the Times Company’s promise to enact the 23 percent wage cut if they do. It’s possible, after all, that such a warning is merely another paper tiger, much like the threat to close the Globe itself. It’s possible that the Times Company, anxious to be done with the guild, could sweeten its deal, that Totten could even convince it to pay more than $33,000 a head to get rid of those lifetime job guarantees. Of course, it’s also possible such a gamble could backfire. This time, the Times Company could make good on the 23 percent wage cut, while those severance packages shrink or disappear.

The magnitude of the June 8 vote is not lost on Totten. Nothing less than the future of the Boston Globe will be at stake. “This,” he says of his members, “is the most important vote they will ever cast in their lives.”