$5 Million
40,000 Daily Copies
317 Editions
137 Locked-Out Employees
115 Striking Staffers
15 Months
12 Replacement Workers
1 Powerful
Union Tactic
The inside
story of the labour-management conflict at Le Journal de Québec
A burly security guard lifts a panel of metal fencing, carries it a couple of feet, and sets it down next to another panel. It’s Sunday, April 22, 2007, and he’s one of about 10 guards piecing together a barrier around a concrete and pink-brick building in an industrial Quebec City neighbourhood. A white sign mounted on the building’s facade reads “Le Journal de Québec: N° 1, Bravo et merci!” thanking the staff for making the daily the most popular paper in the city.
The guards, who wear coats with “Sécurité Kolossal” across the back, are almost finished laying out the line that Journal de Québec employees are not to cross. Attached to the fence is a lockout notice—as of 9 a.m., Sun Media Corporation, a subsidiary of Quebecor Inc., has prohibited 137 editorial and office staff from coming to work. Later that same day, the 115 members of the printing staff who have also been in negotiations will vote to join their colleagues and declare a strike, leaving three union groups—totalling 252 employees—on the street.
The next morning, the managers bus in past the metal fence and the security guards. Camera crews and reporters from other media organizations expected sign-wielding workers, but only Denis Bolduc, the spokesperson for the three union groups, shows up. A thickset and passionate man, Bolduc often seems to be on the verge of tears, either from anger or excitement. Addressing the cameras, he reproaches the employer.
“There’s no picket line today at Le Journal de Québec,” he says. “It’s a choice we made to show how ridiculous the situation is.”
Puzzled, the local media try to find the locked-out workers and spot them all over town—covering press conferences, taking pictures and asking questions as they normally would. Eric Thibault is at the courthouse following a story. He brushes off reporters’ inquiries about why he is there and not picketing. When a TV camera turns his way, he smiles enigmatically. Quebec City’s airwaves are awash with rumors about what the employees are up to. Could they be creating a blog? A weekly newsletter?
Two days after the lockout started, union members appear all over town handing out 40,000 copies of the city’s first free daily, MédiaMatin Québec, to commuters in their cars and on buses, as well as delivering copies to radio stations, getting airtime on all of the morning shows. MédiaMatin is a 24-page tabloid with big colour pictures and local stories. The front page of the first issue boasts an attention-grabbing photo of a tattooed guy in a white undershirt, holding his clenched fist to the camera, his knuckles scarred with red wounds and stitch marks. He’s wearing a gold and silver ring, and chains around his wrist and neck. The headline reads: “Quebec street gangs—enemy number one.”
The story, written by Thibault, highlights the creation of a special police squad to deal with street gangs. It’s an appropriate symbol. This first edition marked a standoff that would last longer than anyone expected, a bare-knuckled brawl between Sun Media’s Le Journal de Québec—number one, bravo et merci—and MédiaMatin, the upstart paper that became Sun Media’s, and Quebecor’s, bête noir.
By adamantly refusing to stop doing their jobs, the employees made a lot more noise than they would have marching around the building with signs and loudspeakers. New communications technology has reduced picket lines into little more than symbolic gestures because replacement workers no longer need to physically cross them. MédiaMatin was a creative and intelligent response. It challenged Quebecor by remaining on the beat and maintaining the strong connection to the city that newspaper journalists forge. The employees didn’t deprive their readers by cutting off services—instead they gave them more to read since Le Journal also kept publishing during the strike. The reporters maintained relationships with sources and continued to cover local stories. Finally, they kept tabs on the people who were doing their jobs but who never needed to set foot in the concrete and pink-brick building in that industrial neighbourhood of Quebec City. Facing a threat to their livelihoods and their craft, the employees showed everyone just how vital their work was to the city.
Newspaper revenue has been declining in North America for years as the internet has drawn the public—followed by advertising dollars—away from dailies. Meanwhile, online competitors such as Craigslist and Kijiji have stolen away classified advertising, traditionally bread-and-butter revenue for newspapers. And as many papers migrate to the internet, they’re realizing that it’s not nearly as profitable as print. With dire forecasts of the newspaper’s impending death commonplace, newsrooms across the country have been hemorrhaging journalists. For example, in late 2008, Sun Media announced it would cut its workforce by 10 percent, and lay off 600 full-time employees. While Canada’s print media are in relatively better shape than those in the U.S., there’s widespread agreement that the business model must change dramatically.
Today, in the midst of
the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, newspaper publishers
across North America are desperate to reduce labour costs. As conflicts
flare up at papers across the country, journalists are struggling to
prove they’re worth their paycheques. During labour disputes at the
Winnipeg Free Press and, recently, at Le Journal de Montréal,
the workers took the fight online by creating news sites. Le
Journal de Québec employees led the way with their free daily,
which they also put on the web. Although not the first of its kind—strike
papers have a proud history in Canada, from the predecessor of the
Toronto Star in the 1890s to the Vancouver Express in the
1970s—MédiaMatin is one of the longest running of such papers
in a major Canadian city. Instead of limiting themselves to the tired
game of picket signs and protests, unions might look to MédiaMatin
Québec as a creative model for pressuring employers.
$25 million in profits, 14 new managers, 5.5 new hours: the employees respond by hatching project la langouste
Le Journal de Québec hadn’t experienced a single strike or lockout since Quebecor founder Pierre Péladeau, father of current CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau, launched the paper in 1967. When Quebecor acquired Sun Media in 1998, Le Journal became part of the chain that published the Sun tabloids.
By the end of summer 2006, signs of a looming conflict began to appear. (Le Journal de Québec refused to comment on the dispute for this article.) With a collective agreement set to expire at the end of December, Sun Media made what union members considered to be unreasonable demands—an increase in work hours from 32 to 37.5 a week with no bump in salary, a move from a four-day week (typical for franco-phone dailies in Quebec) to five, along with added responsibilities. The employees, enjoying some of the sweetest contracts in the country, understandably didn’t want them watered down.
But company officials argued that changes in the newspaper business meant employees would need to accept some major adjustments. With the migration of readers and ad revenues to the internet, Sun Media President Pierre Francoeur announced the company could no longer afford to pay the editorial staff such high salaries—from $64,000 to $100,400—when they worked only four days a week. Despite the industry’s woes, the union members calculated that Le Journal had enjoyed rising circulation and a hefty profit of $25 million over the previous year, a number they say management never contested. The employees argued they should be able to keep their favourable working conditions because the paper was doing so well.
Their union, CUPE, which represents approximately 8,000 communications workers across Quebec, had supported Quebecor’s Videotron employees through a bitter year-long strike ending in 2003. Now, preparing for a tough battle with Quebecor, union leaders expected the worst.
Attitudes hardened in the fall when employees began noticing what seemed like devious preparations by their employer. In one week, Le Journal hired 14 people for new managerial-level positions. According to Quebec labour law, managers hired more than 90 days before a labour dispute aren’t considered “replacement workers,” or scabs, which are illegal in the province. Later, La Presse published a leaked e-mail, dated November 17, from a Quebecor director. In it, she asked managers of the company’s weekly papers to notify her of editors who would be willing to go on “exile to Toronto for the duration of the conflict,” considering the “difficult negotiations at Le Journal de Québec.” A classified ad appeared in Le Journal that read: “Kolossal Security is looking for 200 security guards—for a labour dispute.”
Throughout the fall, there was talk of pickets and protests, but the editorial union representatives, editors Denis Bolduc and Daniel Paquet, plus photographer René Baillargeon, were convinced that picketing in an industrial area would be pointless. After union meetings, the three middle-aged men, all of whom had worked at Le Journal for more than two decades, would gather with reps from the other sections at a bar called Bistrol in the CUPE building. Over a few beers, they talked about how to get their message out and put pressure on Quebecor.
In early November, Bolduc was in his car when his cellphone rang.
“Denis, I’ve got it, I’ve got it!” said Baillargeon. “I know what we have to do! We have to start a free daily!”
“Huh? What? What are you talking about?” asked Bolduc.
Baillargeon, who’s tall and thin with graying hair and a gentle smile, was walking his dog in the woods near his house when he had his epiphany. Normally calm and collected, he sounded breathless with enthusiasm. “Yes, yes, yes … look, we have everyone we need. We have the journalists, the photographers, the editors, the layout and printing staff. We have everyone!”
Stunned, Bolduc said nothing for a few seconds. No, this is too big, he thought. But then … what if we could pull it off?
Over the next few days,
the two men met with Paquet at the Bistrol. Baillargeon argued that
his idea would take Quebecor by surprise and besides, he’d heard that
free dailies were easier to start up than subscriber-
based papers. Even with the help of a few drinks, Paquet, a brusque,
heavy-set man, still thought the plan was completely unrealistic, but
what else could they do? What would it take to start a paper anyway?
An office, computers, scanners, printers, cameras, a server, a phone
and a fax. It would take a printing press and a wire service, a new
logo and design. Who would finance it? They decided to see what Sylvain
Blanchette, the union counsellor, thought of the idea.
Representing Videotron in its dispute with Quebecor had cost cupe millions but taught the union an important lesson: be creative and keep the workers busy. During the strike, Videotron technicians had been involved in vandalism, which landed them in court. (CUPE was still facing a $42-million lawsuit.) Blanchette knew producing a new paper would require some investment, but it would keep the workers working and get their message out to the city five days a week. Best of all, Quebecor was publishing its free daily, 24 Hours, in four cities across the country, and Metro International SA’s Metro was distributed in six—but neither company had a free paper in Quebec City. With Blanchette’s enthusiastic approval, the word came down from CUPE bosses in Montreal and Ottawa: yes.
From the early stages,
the union reps for the office, printing and sales staff were kept in
the loop, but everyone was sworn to secrecy. No one remembers exactly
how they chose their code name, but in the end the project was called
la langouste—the crayfish. Like the crustacean that crawls along
the bottom of rivers and streams, hiding in crevices and under rocks,
the union members would need to keep a low profile.
1,600-square-feet of clandestine workspace, 500 mock copies, 1 independent printer: la langouste stays secret
To make la langouste a reality, the journalists needed an office close to both Le Journal and CUPE buildings. Baillargeon spent days driving around the area until he found a warehouse owned by Côme Veilleux, whose Rapido Équipements Inc. supplied ice cream parlour paraphernalia. The space for rent was a 1,600-square-foot cluster of rooms on the second floor littered with pots and pans, some tables and chairs and dangling cables, all of it covered with a thick layer of dust. The langouste team would later joke that they’d found the ugliest office in all of Quebec City, with its orange-and-brown linoleum and walls painted a mix of beige, pink and purple. Explaining to the owner that he and a few colleagues were in the communications business and needed a place for meetings, Baillargeon negotiated a lease.
Since Bolduc, Paquet and Baillargeon were often busy with union affairs, Eric Émond, a reporter, took charge of the day-to-day preparations. He set up the office space and brought other union members in to work on the design, the computer network and the workflow. Émond says he had never told so many lies in his life, repeatedly inventing reasons for why he was inquiring about newsroom equipment, printing presses or news agencies.
The biggest challenge was finding a printer. All of the presses in Quebec City were owned either by Quebecor or Transcontinental Inc., the company that printed Le Soleil, Le Journal’s daily competitor. It would cost millions to buy the machinery to print a paper themselves, but Baillargeon remembered that a priest he knew had a small press to print his flyers. When he asked whether he could print 40,000 copies of a daily newspaper, the priest laughed. But he did know someone who might be able to.
So Baillargeon called Gilles Robitaille, director of sales at Les Presses du Fleuve in Montmargny, about an hour’s drive away, and the only independent printing press in eastern Quebec. They had a couple of lunchtime meetings at a local Normandin, a chain of family diners, which Émond dubbed their “chics bureaux du Normandin.” In keeping with the secrecy surrounding la langouste, Baillargeon, who often brought along Paquet and Émond, didn’t give full details to Robitaille, a small, eager man with short, white hair and dark-framed rectangular glasses. How much would it cost to print a paper for a conference happening in Quebec?, they would ask. How big? A really big conference, I don’t know … say 40,000 copies? Or how about for a weekly paper? Maybe in Rimouski … or Quebec City.
As for conflicts of interest, they didn’t want to be too obvious asking him about their employer, so they first asked if he had any contracts with Le Soleil. “I don’t print for Le Soleil,” said Robitaille, “and I don’t print for Le Journal de Québec either.”
Since they remained vague about who they were, and Paquet and Émond looked tough enough to pass as enforcers accompanying Baillargeon, they worried that Robitaille might suspect they were part of a biker gang or the Mafia. When they finally decided Robitaille’s prices were reason-able, they told him about the project and made him, and everyone else at Les Presses du Fleuve, sign confidentiality agreements.
Having found a makeshift
office, assembled a production team and lined up a printer, the team
also signed with wire service Agence France-Presse. It had first looked
into a deal with The Canadian Press and discovered its application would
have needed the permission of its members, one of which was Quebecor.
By late January, designer Lyne Grégoire had finished work on the logo
and design. The group printed 500 copies of “numéro zéro,”
a mock-up edition of the paper that was by then named MédiaMatin
Québec. (Bolduc kept the copies in his basement. Even the papers
that had flaws were put into crates, which were wrapped in cellophane
and hidden in the warehouse. No one wanted copies of the paper to be
found in the garbage before its launch.) Despite all the planning and
preparation, Bolduc, Paquet and Baillargeon figured that no more than
30 people had any idea about their plan. La langouste was still
a secret.
30-plus editorial staff, 3 night watchmen, 2 phone lines: bosses surprised as la langouste sees the light of day
At 9 a.m. on Sunday, April 22, 2007, Sun Media declared a lockout of office and newsroom staff. A chain of phone calls spread the word to all 252 employees. As the Kolossal security guards set up the metal fence around the building and the union scheduled meetings in a church basement, the printing press staff held a general assembly. By late afternoon, they announced a 97-percent vote in favour of a strike.
Among the union groups, there was shock. Serge Turgeon, an archivist, felt anxious about having to relive the 10 months he spent picketing outside Le Soleil before coming to Le Journal in 1978. He remembered the rain, the winter chills, the overwhelming summer heat and the desperation of it all. Jean-François Racine, a journalist who figured he was too young to waste his time walking back and forth holding a sign, decided he’d probably look for another job instead.
From the rectangular table at the front of the room where the union representatives and cupe staff sat, Sylvain Blanchette, the union counsellor, surprised everyone by announcing there would be no picket line. At that moment, a group of people wearing white vests that read MédiaMatin began handing out copies of numéro zéro. The rows of employees flipped through the paper, exchanging looks of confusion until, gradually, the room began to buzz with laughter and chatter.
Blanchette announced, “Free … daily … in … Quebec City!”
The next day, as camera crews waited for picketers little more than a kilometre away, about 30 reporters, editors, photographers and designers clambered through a warehouse full of ice cream-making equipment and neon signs to crowd into the offices on the second floor. It was high season in the ice cream supplies business and Veilleux—who had just learned the guys who just needed meeting space were actually launching a daily newspaper—soon became frazzled by his suddenly high-maintenance tenants. There were only two phone lines. One doubled as the fax line for Émond, and the other was shared by the rest of the phones. Journalists trying to conduct interviews struggled to hear over the noise, and suffered frequent interruptions as others picked up a phone and started dialing. And not only did the paper lack a photo archive, there were more photo requests than photographers and more photographers than cameras.
After the design staff finished laying out the pages, the editors checked them one last time, then tacked them up on a wall in the hallway where a group of journalists gave them final reads during the evening. Finally, the first paper went to the printer at around 1 a.m. After unwinding over beer and chips, most people gradually drifted home. But Paquet and two colleagues stayed all night. Lacking a security system, he feared someone would break in and pour water on the server, putting an end to their plans. There would be similar night-watchmen shifts for months at la langouste.
At around 4:30 in the morning on April 24, people began arriving at the CUPE parking lot. When the papers arrived about an hour late, André Masson, the distribution manager, had already picked team leaders and assigned them strategic locations around the city to hand out papers.
That night, bailiffs showed up to most of their homes with a warning from Sun Media to stop publishing and distributing the paper. Two days later, the Quebec Superior Court dismissed the company’s request for an injunction that could have put an end to MédiaMatin. In the ensuing months, the courts rejected another injunction attempt and an appeal, ruling that putting out a paper was a reasonable pressure tactic to get Sun Media back to the bargaining table.
The city welcomed the new paper enthusiastically. Students and commuters read it on the bus; drivers rolled down their windows and often asked for two or three copies. Taxi drivers picked some up for themselves and their passengers. Restaurants and cafés wanted stacks, and even though the union members delivered the paper downtown only, copies ended up in the suburbs and nearby towns. Younger readers liked that the stories were shorter and the pictures larger than in the city’s main dailies—not to mention that the paper was free. Morning radio shows often referred to MédiaMatin stories because the local coverage was so strong. Within a few months, the paper launched its own website.
Throughout the strike,
workers deliberately avoided using any equipment, archives or templates
from Le Journal. They also refrained from soliciting advertising
at the beginning, so they couldn’t be accused of competing with their
employer. In September 2007, on the day the courts rejected Sun Media’s
appeal, a TV reporter asked Denis Bolduc if the legal battle had been
emotional for him. He started to answer, but tears filled his eyes and
he paused to compose himself. Struggling to speak without breaking down,
he said: “Quebecor ... they don’t know how loyal we really were
to Le Journal de Québec.”
12 replacement workers, 3 spectacular screw-ups, 1 new daily-newspaper war: la langouste flexes its pincers
Before new technologies introduced in the 1970s and 1980s made the printing process less specialized, strikes that included the press operators would force newspapers to stop publishing. Quebecor’s first major daily, Le Journal de Montréal, benefited from a strike at La Presse in 1964 that halted publication for months, allowing Péladeau’s new paper to build a readership. In 1979, The Montreal Star—the more popular of the city’s two major English dailies—folded, in part because it lost so many readers during an eight-month strike that forced it to stop publishing. It was an ominous warning to newspapers, already struggling to maintain circulation numbers, to never stop the presses. Today, thanks to advanced communications technologies and the convenience of the internet for transferring files, newspapers are generally able to keep publishing during strikes. But Quebec (like British Columbia) has anti-scab legislation, making it illegal for companies to hire replacement workers. Which is why Le Journal de Québec had tried to find creative ways to manoeuvre around the law and keep publishing.
Because the locked-out journalists kept working, they rubbed shoulders with the people doing their jobs for Le Journal. Unfamiliar reporters and photographers appeared around town. They were hired from the Montreal-based Keystone Press Agency; Quebecor’s online portal, canoe.ca; and Nomad Press Agency, which Quebecor’s former vice-president of media and development created during the labour dispute. Inevitably, harsh words were exchanged and MédiaMatin workers tried to have the interlopers thrown out of press conferences and the courthouse. Meanwhile, canoe.ca articles appeared verbatim in the paper without bylines.
The union members at MédiaMatin kept a record of Journal stories by people they considered to be illegally crossing the picket line. In the summer of 2007, CUPE took Le Journal, along with seven reporters and photographers, to the Quebec Labour Relations Board, accusing them of acting as replacement workers. The board ordered the company to stop using four of the seven employees. Then, in December, the union accused 17 others of crossing the line, even though none of them had worked on the physical premises. Under Quebec’s anti-scab legislation, which dates back to the late ’70s, it’s unlawful for newly hired employees to work in the establishment during a strike or lockout, but the law offers no interpretation of “the establishment.” In the past, when work had to be done on-site, a literal reading made sense, but the internet has complicated things. In December 2008, the labour board concluded that Le Journal had used 12 replacement workers and broken Quebec labour law—a legal decision that expanded the definition of the workplace. Le Journal has requested a review of the labour board’s decision.
No matter who was doing the work at Le Journal, the editorial quality had taken a hit. Except for a few token local stories, the paper was full of wire copy from across the country. And there were some spectacular screw-ups. Mistakes in the classified section and puzzles page annoyed readers, but more troubling were reporting errors. In December 2007, a young and inexperienced reporter, employed through canoe.ca, was charged for disregarding a publication ban when he included the name of a sexual assault victim in his article, which had appeared both online and in the paper. (Newspaper clippings about the incident were still hanging on the wall of the courthouse press room a year later.) In July 2007, Le Journal reported that John Ferguson, the former Montreal Canadien, had died—a full 12 days before he actually did. Then, in February 2008, a story claimed that Marius Fortier, one of the founders of the Quebec Nordiques, had made an appearance at a peewee hockey tournament even though he’d been dead for more than two years. Le Journal managed to kill one man before his time and bring another back to life.
MédiaMatin didn’t
print such substantial mistakes, but it also had fewer opportunities
to make them, running at only 24 pages most days. The tabloid focused
on crime and sports and its articles were short. The reporters stuck
to local stories. They didn’t have the money to travel but they also
wanted to emphasize the importance of local coverage. An early editorial
decried the influx of stories from Montreal and the rest of the country
in Le Journal over the years, at the expense of local reporting.
For one press conference, the locked-out workers made a banner with
Le Journal logo and the words “Made in Toronto” emblazoned across
it and later pinned it to a trailer parked in the CUPE parking lot (the
distribution office). After a complaint by Sun Media, the court ordered
the employees to take it down because of copyright restrictions, but
that didn’t stop the image from repeatedly appearing on TV screens
across the region. The union’s accusations that Le Journal
was being edited in Toronto, with its classified ads handled out of
Kanata, near Ottawa, and the paper printed in Mirabel, shamed Quebecor.
It seemed like a fight between David and Goliath, or like the resistance
of the petit village gaulois, Astérix and Obélix’s hometown
and the only independent community in the heart of the Roman Empire.
5.5 new hours, 4-day week, 1 new Journal de Québec news-room: the employees bid farewell to la langouste
The employees hadn’t expected the conflict to last so long—over 15 months and 317 editions of MédiaMatin Québec, which cost CUPE approximately $5 million. But it seemed to end quickly and unexpectedly. When the union and Sun Media struck a deal early in the morning on July 2, 2008—on the eve of Quebec City’s 400th anniversary—the editorial staff at MédiaMatin had already been making plans for the fall.
On the front page of its last edition on August 8, Debusschère holds up a MédiaMatin baseball cap, tipping it in acknowledgment. The union members spent their last day handing out the paper on the streets of Quebec City and bidding their readers adieu. Along with tears and a sense of loss that the big adventure was over, many felt relief they were finally getting their jobs back. Not all of the 252 employees were there to share the moment, however. Some, like Émond, left for out-of-town jobs; others found new employment in Quebec City, including one member of the printing staff hired at the Presses du Fleuve. Still others accepted retirement packages. And one man took his own life. No strike is easy on the workers, but for many, the achievement of creating MédiaMatin made it manageable.
As far as the collective agreement goes, there were concessions on both sides. The employees agreed to work 37.5 hours a week instead of 32 for the same salary, but packed into four days instead of five. They agreed to have their work published on a new Journal de Québec website and on canoe.ca, so long as Canoe pieces would not run in the paper. Both sides claimed to be happy with the deal, although the union wondered whether the possibility of an upcoming confrontation at Le Journal’s sister tabloid, Le Journal de Montréal might have sped up the process. In January 2009, management locked out employees at that paper and as of early March, the workers were still on the street.
There is a brand new newsroom at Le Journal de Québec, and all the journalists and photographers now have BlackBerrys. Some of the team spirit and camaraderie that was developed at la langouste remains, but something else was lost along the way. There’s a lingering resentment toward the managers who stayed in the building during the conflict, and for those who sent in text and photos. Many say working feels more like a job than it did before. They don’t have the same passion for the trade. Paquet says when he used to go to a restaurant, he’d always have a pen on hand and if he overheard something that might become a story, he’d jot it down.
“Now, when I go to the restaurant,” he says, “I eat.”
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