Tagged: UAW
A Striking Difference
I don’t get out much…to cover stories, that is. Being semi-retired, freelancing for Forbes.com, I knock out most of my stories from the comfort of my home office, conducting interviews over Zoom or Teams or whatever electronic method allows me to wear sweatpants below a more suitable shirt.
But when you’re a news guy, no matter how old, there’s something you never lose—the urge to actually be out where the action is.
I’ve been covering the UAW strike against GM, Ford and Stellantis pretty much the way I described above, but the other day I decided I had to put on actual pants, and shoes, and ran down to Ford’s giant assembly plant in Wayne, Mich. In suburban Detroit, about a 30 minute drive from my house.
I told my editor I was out for “pictures and perspective.” What I really wanted was, yes, pictures, but to speak face-to-face with striking workers, learn their stories, find out why walking off the job was worth any financial sacrifice and yes, to smell the fires in those barrels along the picket lines where picketers could find a little warmth. They all smell the same and I like it.
I spoke with a guy wearing a reflective vest and a huge smile. His name is Roger. Said he’s just three months from retirement and could have easily just ridden out his time, but he told me it was worth spending time on the line to try to win financial security for, as he called them “the young ones.”
Roger told me the aggressive tactics taken by UAW president Shawn Fain were unlike anything his predecessors had attempted and at first “he scared the hell out of me.” But now Roger can’t wait to see if it all pays off.
I spoke with a woman who didn’t want to give me her name. No problem. I told her whatever insight and information she could offer was more important than her name. “OK, cool,” she said, now more relaxed. “I don’t care if we don’t get everything Shawn’s demanding, but just something better than we have now. We gotta get something.”
You don’t get this stuff sitting in your basement in front of a computer and I’d be out there every day except I’m not a full-time reporter anymore, after a certain number of stories I don’t get paid and working for free’s not the kind of charity the IRS will let me deduct.
I do think how things have changed, mainly due to technology, social media and the economy.
In 1998, when I was CNN’s Detroit Bureau Chief and correspondent I covered the entire 54-day strike at two GM parts plants in Flint, Mich. Resulting the automakers shutting down completely, costing it $3 billion after taxes.
We were out there every single day. On the picket lines, at the union halls, on the phone. Facebook and social media weren’t yet invented. The UAW president couldn’t go live, neither side posted details of their demands, offers and counter-offers. You got what you got from digging, from sources, from gumshoe reporting.
Working at CNN meant also doing about a billion live shots. I stood at a corner in front of Flint Metal Stamping for hours and hours knocking out one live shot after another, for CNN, for Headline News, for CNN International, for CNN affiliates.
Makes it hard to get any reporting done. I’d have to tell the sound tech to kill my mic so I couldn’t be heard over the satellite feed. Then I’d quickly make a call or two in between live shots to try to dig up some new nugget of news I could report.
Frequently, other reporters on the scene would stop and listen to what I was saying to see if they were either missing anything or if I was fulla shit.
I remember two of my friendly competitors—one at the AP, the other at USA Today paying especially close attention as I was on the air. You must know print reporters are contemptuous of broadcast journalists, figuring we’re all about hair and make up and not about honest reporting.
When I got off the air, they walked up to me and actually said, “we were listening to you and everything you said was right.” Well, why wouldn’t it be? Since we were friends they took no umbrage when I shot back, “bet you wish you could say that about your stories.” All’s fair on a breaking story.
That strike went on so long it actually jeopardized a promise I had made to my the, 10-year old daughter. Remember, this was 1998. The Spice Girls were huge. I had scored free tickets to their show at the late, great Palace of Auburn Hills, about a 30-minute drive down I-75 from Flint.
CNN, bless ’em, understood the gravity of the situation and actually sent in a reporter to relive me while I dashed down the freeway, took my daughter to see Baby, Sporty, Posh, and Scary—Ginger had just left the group, sad. It was, to that moment, the best day of her short life. Then I ran back up to reclaim my spot staking out the endless contract talks.
When the merciful end of the two-month ordeal was about to come to an end, there were no social media posts, no Tweets, or whatever they’re called now, no Facebook Live webcasts.
The most plugged-in reporters got tips on their phones from their best sources, then, to make it more official, a guy came running out of the Holiday Inn where the talks were going on and yelled, “hey! Press conference in 30 minutes! Get inside and set up!” That’s all we needed. So analog! So fun.
There’s something about being outside, on the scene, building relationships, swapping tips on where to get the best sub sandwiches for lunch. The folks at the plants ALWAYS know the best lunch spots. It’s never a chain place.
The guy at the local deli named for the guy who owned it was freakin’ Picasso of subs. Best bread, best meat, best cheese, best bullshit to share when picking it up. Wasn’t always bullshit. The great sandwich guy was also a great listener and often picked up tips he’d exchange for tips.
You don’t get that stuff sitting at a laptop or scrolling emails and texts on your phone. Sure, it’s convenient and fast, but it’s not as fun, and I bet the chainstore sandwich you ordered from Doordash sucked compared to the Stradivarius of Subs wrapped in wax paper with a fat pickle tucked in by the guy at the deli by the plant.
Well, it was fun getting out for a morning, chatting with folks just hoping to get their share of the bounty and a better life. Made my life better too…before I descended back to the basement.
An Open Letter to the UAW and Detroit 3 Automakers
Dear Contract Combatants:
I’m writing to you to request you move the expiration date of your labor contracts because it conflicts with a date related to my domestic bliss and continued marital comity.
You see, my wife and I were married on September 15th, 1973 about 370 miles east of Detroit in our native state of New York.
We were but 21 at the time and not yet even experienced enough in our careers to call us “green” meaning we had no congizance whatsoever of your quadrennial exercise in contractual Hunger Games.
We led fine and happy lives through our early married life, always approaching celebration our anniversary with happy anticipation and thoughts of expensive gifts and meals.
But in 1989 that all changed. CNN transferred me up to the Motor City from Atlanta to take over as the bureau chief and correspondent at the network’s Detroit Bureau. We covered a wide region and variety of stories from suicide doctor Jack Kevorkian to hurricanes, crime, medicine, government…everything, including, of course, the auto industry. Indeed CNN founder Ted Turner created the Detroit Bureau to cover, as he accurately called it, “the biggest industry in the world.”
That meant covering the contract talks between you guys and of course the contracts always expired on either September 14th or 15th. Since you almost never reached a tentative agreement by the expiration date we beat reporters would get stuck awaiting the white smoke to appear languishing, sleeping, filing, doing thumbsucker live shots, killing time until something happened.
Yes, you automakers fed us well. Any reporter of a certain vintage will not forget GM providing an almost endless supply of Dove Bars.
Good eatin’ but it kept me away from home on our anniversary which caused a combination of disappointment, anger, tears and fat chance reliving honeymoon night.
On our 20th anniversary in 1993, CNN took pity on me and sent former Detroit Bureau chief, the late, great Bob Vito to spell me at Ford headquarters. Nice touch, but Vito didn’t show up until 11:30pm on the 15th from Los Angeles because, as he put it, “I hadn’t had a Lafayette Coney in years and I had a craving.”
Not only was he very late, but had terrible chile dog breath. I got home with about 3 minutes left on our “special” day.
Every contract since, whether I was working in TV, the Detroit News or flipped over to PR at Chrysler, we’d have to time-shift celebration of our anniversary to avoid being screwed by you guys not shaking hands on a deal on time.
This year is our 50th anniversary. I’m now semi-retired but working freelance. I have informed my clients that I’m out of the mix this time around on the 15th. No matter what happens…deal, no deal, strike, no strike, I’m a ghost.
Even though technology..and common sense, has elminated the need for reporters to sleep at the various automakers’ headquarters awaiting word that you’ve either reached a deal or are playing the game into overtime, I’ll be spending the 15th blissfully someplace else, celebrating the fact my wife and I haven’t drawn pistols at dawn after half a century together.
But then, dammit, the clock will tick, the calendar will turn and the 15th will turn into the 16th and if you guys don’t figure it out by then I’m out of excuses.
So help a reporter out. Move the date your contracts expire to, say, the spring. How ’bout April 15th, tax day? No one celebrates that. How hard would that be? Maybe I’ll even buy you all Dove Bars.
Thanks very much,
Ed Garsten
An Explosion, A Shooting And Dove Bars-Tales of Covering UAW-Detroit 3 Contract Talks
Contract talks between the UAW and the U.S. automakers officially kicked off this week with three grip and grin handshakes-across-the-table photo ops before the two sides retreat to the process of collective arguing..er..bargaining. The real fun, however, doesn’t really start until the contracts are about to expire on Sept. 14th.
The first contract talks I ever covered were in 1990. As the contract expiration neared and talks revved up, my CNN crew and I, along with several dozen other journalists camped out in the press room at the old General Motors headquarters on Second Avenue in Detroit where we expected to stay until the white smoke, or some other signal let us know the two sides wore each other down and agreed to a new pact.
This was all new to me, as I’d only been covering the auto beat since being transferred to Detroit from Atlanta the year before. I quickly learned an important thing about covering the talks–GM had a kickass catering department. Knowing we would be bored stiff cooling our heels for hours on end waiting for an agreement, or breakdown, the kind folks at GM kept us fed..and fed..and fed. Every few hours more food would arrive–chicken, steak, snacks and of course, the most popular item, Dove Bars. Oh yes…all the Dove Bars you could lick, slurp or swallow. The only thing never served up–was news.
So we hung in there all day, all night, filing whatever updates we could gin up to keep our editors and producers happy. In between, to keep from going stir crazy, we’d play cards and then a crazy game one of my producers made up called “Slug Charades.” For those not in the biz, a slug is a story title. At CNN it was important to make up a catchy slug for your story because sometimes that would be all it took to sell the piece to a show producer in Atlanta. So we passed the time acting out some of our more clever slugs while the rest of our bureau crew attempted to identify it. The other scribes in the room just assumed we’d OD’d on Dove Bars and would need to detox eventually on GM catering’s tasty rice pilaf.
Well into the second day we got an urgent call from out national assignment desk in Atlanta. “Get the hell outta there! A ship blew up in the Saginaw River near Bay City!” No problem. We got our parole but someone needed to stay back to keep an eye on the talks, so we left one of our bureau staffers and told him to let us know the moment anything happened either way–and off we went…but not before a local TV reporter who had evidently lost her mind from all the waiting around could not believe we were bolting and yelled out, “what the fuck! You have to stay! We all have to stay! You can’t leave us behind!” Alas we just smiled…well..smirked…and took off for the two hour drive up to Bay City where we knocked out a few live shots, fed a package and high-tailed it back to Detroit where, back at GM, the two sides were still going at it. At least that’s what we assumed since we hadn’t heard from our guy who was holding the fort.
Knowing we had someone on-site, our desk told us to go home for a few hours, catch a few winks, take a shower, change our clothes. Early the next morning our guy left at GM rings my phone. He was from Georgia. “Hey Eeeeeeddddddddd! Somethin’s weird. No one’s in the press room anymore! Ah dunno whut’s goin’ on!” Shit. I told him to call up to the GM press office, which he did, then called me back to inform me, “sheeeeeeet! All I did was close mah eyes for a bit and they freakin’ came to an agreement while ah wuz sleepin’! What should ah doooooooooo?” Hmm…find another job?
Well, yes…there was no one in the newsroom anymore because….THEY WERE ALL UPSTAIRS AT A NEWS CONFERENCE ANNOUNCING THE CONTRACT SETTLEMENT!
Luckily, CNN had four affiliates in Detroit at the time so once our national desk realized Sleeping Beauty had napped through the breaking story they were able to quickly arrange to grab the live signal from one of the stations.
The rest of us had to hustle downtown to the bureau, which was two blocks from GM, and crash together some sort of reporter package.
We were all just glad it would be, at the time, three years until the next round of talks. Oh…nothing could happen, right?
Shit.
Our wedding anniversary is September 15th–the precise day the contract would expire. 1993 marked our 20th anniversary. Kinda special, right? I spent most of it at Ford World Headquarters, “The Glass House,” instead of celebrating our big anniversary at home with my wife and kids. CNN was sensitive to this and was kind enough to agree to fly in my predecessor in Detroit, Bob Vito, from L.A., where he was now stationed. After all, he had many years of covering contract talks. The plan was for Bob to spell me for a bit so we could at least go out to dinner, then I would return to Ford.
Heh. I waited and waited and waited and waited and Vito doesn’t show up until around midnight. “Where the hell were ya?” I ask. “Oh…I just really needed a Lafayette coney dog, it’d been a long time.”
Whatever. I finally got home for late night drink and toast. Better than nothing. Of course all is not fair. Along with all the other journalists I had been going stir crazy at Ford for almost 36 hours with nothing. Then my guy, fat and happy with his belly filled with coneys strolls in and an hour or so later they reach an agreement.
The last talks I covered for CNN were in 1999 and this time we were holed up at the basement press room at the Chrysler headquarters in suburban Auburn Hills, Mich. Again…nothing to report for hours and hours and hour but we were always well fed, which just made us more sleepy.
You know that thing about history repeating itself? Yeah..it’s not bull. Nine years after being wrenched from GM to cover the Saginaw River explosion we get an urgent call from the Atlanta desk. “There’s been a church shooting in Fort Worth, Texas! Multiple deaths. We’re throwing a ton of resources at it, so get the hell outta there and head to Texas!”
Uh…sure. By the time we could get our gear packed and down to the airport, which was at least an hour’s drive away, and then down to Fort Worth, what really would be left to cover? But we did as we were told, hustled to the scene and I was instructed to stand in front of a camera to do a live shot. I stood there for an hour when some producer said, “eh, don’t really need ya.” The next day we were assigned a follow up piece. Filed it and another producer said, “eh, don’t really need that.” So we took our toys and flew back to Detroit to continue covering the contact talks but…well, you know the ending…they settled while we were en route and CNN had a reporter from one of our affiliates do a live shot.
So…the final tally on that one? Got wrenched from covering contract talks to fly 1,500 miles to cover a shooting story that in a town where CNN already had a bureau and crew that did a fine job handling it when it broke, so our work was not needed and in the meantime missed the big finish to the story we should never had been told to vacate.
I covered one more set of talks in 2003 when I was the GM beat writer for The Detroit News. This time I was allowed to see it through and no one napped. But times had changed significantly since 1990. Despite my strongest hankerings there wasn’t a Dove Bar to be found.
edLINES 