No strike last night, thank God. What today brings is anyone's guess, but the Pollyanna in me wants to think that as long as they're all willing to keep talking, to keep working on it, that a solution will come.
I can't think about what a strike is going to look like, what the strike paper and the "scab" paper would look like, or why it still seems some people (thankfully, few) have this romantic Norma Rae vision to peddle about the '85 strike and how everyone's in this thing together. Nobody's in anything together these days, except debt.
There were many, many people at the Inquirer yesterday, average employees with so-so seniority who know that they're about to get laid off no matter how the talks end, who still showed up and did a full day's work in good faith. I ache for them, and I honor them now because it's obvious that the paper's stars will stay and the lower-paid bureau reporters will stay, but the average Joe and Jane Schmo employees, the ones who do their jobs capably but unremarkably, will get the ax. And aren't those exactly the folks a labor union is supposed to protect -- the ones who have the least protection on their own?
I ache for those who would be faced with having to cross that picket line.
I ache for myself, for loving the Inquirer so much and for believing in it so strongly, and for being so angry over why it seems so willfully blind to the way the world has changed around it. I had just read on Phawker that the strike wasn't going to be called tonight, before we even got the official call at home. Maybe that means something.
I'm thrilled to know that there will be people left on Broad Street when the dust settles who are committed to doing good journalism whether with a staff of 50 or of 500. And it can be done.We lived through it in Asbury: the mind-shifting newsroom contraction, the months of kvetching about how we were expected to do the same work and more, but with drastically fewer people. But that paper's still going to come out every day, and there's only so long you can blame mediocrity on inadequate staffing. Yes, acknowledge the seismic shift. Feel nostalgic for those who are gone. But by God, keep working, because if the paper sucks, nobody's going to blame the folks who left or were laid off, only the ones who remain.
Back in Asbury, the smart people, or at least the ones who didn't jump ship the first chance they got, figured out pretty quickly that it doesn't pay to pine for the days when budgets and bureaus were fat and fully-staffed. Those people, that money, that whole world is never coming back, and it isn't about doing the same thing you always did: It's about doing something new, becoming something new, a better version of a good and noble thing.
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