Pay of $30 a week for six days of work, arbitrary firings, salary cuts, and ridiculous schedules. That's what brought the Guild to the newsrooms of Toronto in the Dirty Thirties. And since then, SONG has been working hard to get a better deal first for newspaper and now for all media employees.

 

It seems odd now, but in the 1930's, working Canadians looked south of the border when they wanted strong, dynamic and progressive union representation. For news industry employees, the obvious choice was the American Newspaper Guild, founded in 1933 by a man who was then one of the most well-known columnists in North America, Heywood Broun.

 

While skilled craft workers such as printers and press operators had long been organized at most major papers, the union idea was new to reporters, editors, advertising sales staff, and circulation and clerical workers.

 

But a small group of Toronto newsroom workers — many of them women, who were only a small minority of editorial staffers in those days — brought the American Newspaper Guild to Canada in September 1936 with the daunting task of organizing the newsrooms of the four Toronto dailies then publishing.

 

The new local was called the Toronto Newspaper Guild, Local 87 of the ANG, and its first decade was largely a story of failure. With legal protections weak, publishers were able to get away with subtle and not-so-subtle pressure tactics in order to prevent unions from taking root.

 

Even at the Toronto Daily Star, known as a friend of labour (and founded by striking printers in the 1890s) an attempt in the early 40s to negotiate a contract collapsed after the company demoted known union supporters and engaged in the kind of blatant intimidation that is outlawed today.

 

The ANG revoked the charter of the Toronto local in 1943.

 

The First Contract

But the need and desire for a union didn't die. In 1948, the Toronto Newspaper Guild was resurrected and was able to demonstrate majority support in the Star newsroom.

That meant it could be certified by the Ontario Labour Relations Board under newly enacted labour laws, with the result that the company was obliged to bargain with the union.

The new union's first president was Beland Honderich, later to become publisher and part-owner of the Star. Honderich set the tone for this new union when he wrote in the first issue of the local union’s newsletter: “We are now trade unionists…members of that great body of men and women who have been striving for years to improve the living standards of Canadian workers…A union, if it is to be successful, must be representative…it must be democratic…”

Those goals continue to motivate this union.

After several months of bargaining, the Guild's first contract in Toronto and indeed the first ANG contract in Canada was signed in April, 1949, containing the milestone pay rate of $80 a week for reporters/photographers with five years of experience.

 

The Star proclaimed itself on its news pages as the “first newspaper in Canada to establish the five-day, 40-hour week for editorial employees...it now becomes the first and only Toronto daily newspaper to pay its editorial workers time-and-a-half in cash for overtime.”

 

The Guild was on its way. By 1953, the newsroom of the Toronto Telegram (a paper which eventually folded in 1971) was under Guild contract, and the Globe and Mail followed two years later. At the same time, other departments at the Star followed the newsroom into the union, so that the Guild soon represented advertising sales staff, circulation employees, delivery drivers and accounting clerks totaling almost 1300 members.

 

Other early Guild papers in Ontario were the Toronto edition of the Daily Racing Form, and the Brantford Expositor, whose mid-1950s unionization marked the local's first foray outside Toronto.

 

Employees made major gains in wages, benefits and working conditions in those early years, and were generally able to do it without having to resort to strike action.

The first strike in the young local’s history took place at the Racing Form in July of 1951. It lasted all of 30 minutes. All 13 members went on strike when the employer refused to implement wage increases that had need negotiated. They returned to work with guarantees that all members would get their increases and they did.

 

The First Strike

When the Guild's first major strike came, it was at a small paper, and it was a messy one.

Employees at the Thomson-owned Oshawa Times walked out in 1966 in a two-week strike that became one of the biggest Canadian labour battles of the era. While the strike involved only 35 employees, the courts granted a controversial injunction limiting picketing.

That prompted a rebellion in the strong union town, and picket lines swelled to more than 1,000 with the support of other unions.

When the local sheriff showed up to try to enforce the injunction, he was pelted with snowballs and beat a hasty retreat.

Newspaper publishers were outraged, but the strike was settled soon after. A second strike in Oshawa was also long and difficult in 1995 and created the local union’s first strike paper operating in competition with the Times. At the end of the strike neither paper survived.

 

In 1955 the young local union had to confront the loss of one of its early activists and a former president A.O. (Alf) Tate, a Star photographer who was killed in a work accident. Tate and reporter Doug Cronk were assigned to report on a hurricane off the coast of Florida when their plane went missing. Their bodies were never found.

 

The union honoured Tate by creating a journalism scholarship in his name. Originally, the scholarship was awarded to a needy grade 11 student who demonstrated ability and was selected by the Toronto School Board. Today the local maintains the A.O. Tate scholarship for a journalism student at Ryerson University in Toronto.

 

Fred Jones followed Tate as local union president. Jones left the local to work for the international union as a Canadian representative where he continued to work with local 87.

 

He later returned to the local as Executive Secretary. His contribution to the union has also been recognized with an internal award. Every year a local activist is granted an educational subsidy in Jones’ honour.

 

Co-operation between the Guild and other newspaper unions was one of the keys to the gains at the Toronto dailies in the 1950s, but the solidarity was strained in the wake of a disastrous strike by the printers (members of the International Typographical Union) in 1964. The printers at all three dailies took a stand against technological change, but Guild members continued working, and the papers continued publishing with the help of strikebreakers. The unionized printers never went back to work.

Growth in the 60s, 70s

The late '60s and the 1970s were a more stable period for the union, as the Guild settled into perhaps a too-cosy relationship with the newspaper companies. Organizing of new groups was given little priority. The union, recognizing it was more than just a Toronto organization, changed its name in the late 70s to Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild, but made no serious effort to expand.

 

The parent union, recognizing it had members outside the United States, changed its name from American Newspaper Guild to The Newspaper Guild. The early 1970s also saw the first major stirrings of Canadian nationalism within the union, as the Toronto Guild pressed with only minimal success for more Canadian autonomy within the international structure.

 

The local also had stable leadership through these years. Jack Dobson of the Globe and Mail served 8 terms as local president from 1959 through 1966 when he resigned to become a local union staff representative. Later, John Lowe of the Star led the union for 9 terms from 1976 through 1984. While a woman was not president until 1989 when Gail Lem was first elected, women played a key role in the union and its executive from the earliest days.

 

Star reporter Judith Robinson was part of the 1939 organizing committee and women like Lillian Thain and Nadia Bozinoff also of the Star, Isabel Greenwood and Jean Pakenham of the Telegram and Margaret Daly of the Star all made fundamental contributions to the union’s successes.

 

The 1980s saw a shakeup at SONG, as new officers were elected with a mandate to organize more workplaces and take a more aggressive approach to negotiations.

 

At the bargaining table this new approach saw the Guild's first strike ever at the Toronto Star, in 1983. The 1,500 SONG members were off the job for only four days, including a weekend, but the strike marked a turning point, and companies got the message that they couldn't take the union for granted.

 

Meanwhile at the Globe and Mail, Guild employees took their first ever strike vote in 1982, also marking a new era in relations with the company. Those negotiations ended without a strike, and the Globe unit of SONG still has a strike-free record.

 

Organizing took off in the early '80s, with the Hamilton Spectator newsroom joining SONG and with the landmark organizing drive at Maclean's magazine, where editorial staff went on strike for two weeks in 1983 and gained their first contract. Maclean’s part-time employees joined the union in 2005 and these two groups represent the only unionized operations in the Rogers Publishing empire. The Globe and Mail's outside circulation department and advertising staff also went union.

 

With those successes, news industry workers saw the benefits of unionization. By the mid-80s, editorial employees at the Metroland chain of non-daily papers joined SONG and bargained a contract that is seen as the pace-setter in the community newspaper sector. Soon employees of other non-dailies sought out SONG, and the union was expanding rapidly.

 

In the late 1980's, two of the largest non-union newsrooms in the province — the London Free Press and Kitchener-Waterloo Record —joined SONG. This was followed by organizing at a number of small Thomson-owned papers. Following long and bitter — but successful — first-contract strikes at Thomson papers in Guelph and Cambridge, SONG was able to organize employees at Thomson outlets in Belleville, Chatham, Niagara Falls and Midland. Contracts at all these papers made major improvements in wages.

 

The 1980’s also saw a move for the Guild offices to its current home at 1253 Queen St. E., just east of Leslie St. In 1984, SONG purchased the two-storey former Target air conditioning and heating contractor building for $170,000. With the rapid expansion of membership and units, the former quarters on the ground floor and basement of a townhouse at 219 Jarvis St. had become cramped.

 

Despite layoffs and hiring freezes at many papers during the 1990s, SONG's membership continued to grow through organizing.

 

Going Canadian

Throughout the period of expansion in the 1990’s, the leadership of SONG became increasingly frustrated with the lack of attention and service that the Newspaper Guild's Washington head office was providing to Canadians. After a long and unsuccessful campaign for more Canadian autonomy within the Guild international, SONG members voted in 1994 to sever ties with The Newspaper Guild. Shortly afterwards, SONG affiliated with the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), and is now Local 87-M of the CEP. The CEP is an all-Canadian union with more than 150,000 members and Canada’s largest media union.

 

The Guild and the Star again did battle in 1992 during a one-month strike over the company's plans to contract-out its delivery department. The strike failed to stop the company's plans, but got a better deal for the laid-off employees.

 

In 1996, SONG's long-time president, Gail Lem of the Globe and Mail unit, was elected as the CEP's national vice-president of media, the top officer for the CEP's 15,000-strong media section, representing employees in print and broadcast across Canada. She was followed in that post by Peter Murdoch who is a former Hamilton Spectator reporter and SONG representative.

 

Despite restrictive labour laws passed by the Conservative government elected in Ontario in 1995, SONG has continued to organize, bringing in employees of ethnic community newspapers at Sing Tao Daily, Share, the Korea Times and the World Journal. In early 2002 a further 350 employees of the London Free Press chose union representation with SONG.

 

Their Quebecor cousins in the Toronto Sun newsroom joined up in early 2003, followed closely by the Local's first broadcasting bargaining units at CHUM's New PL/WI/NX now known as the A Channel and Corus. Soon after pre-press employees at the Toronto Sun and editorial employees at the Ottawa Sun chose SONG.

 

In addition, employees at the Stratford Beacon Herald and the Simcoe Reformer and the free daily Metro have joined SONG. By 2004, the Local represented media workers in newspapers, magazines, book publishing, television and specialty broadcasting, radio and internet: in recognition of this diversity, we changed the name of our Local to the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild.

 

Expanding Beyond Southern Ontario

In 2008, SONG expanded in a big way to the Ottawa area where we’d already organized the Ottawa Sun.

 

Beginning in January, 2008, we added seven media units from the former Local 102-O, including the House of Commons broadcast/technical group, the Ottawa Citizen mailroom, the Winchester Press, the Glengarry News, the Pembroke Observer and the audio-video units, TelAv and ELC.

 

The organizing continued in late 2008 with the addition of the Sarnia Observer editorial department and, in 2009, with the associated Dresden Pagination Centre. And in 2010, we added the Metroland Ottawa unit.

 

We now represent more than 3,000 workers in all aspects of the media in Ontario and 34 different workplaces. The local and its members confront daily issues of media concentration, editorial integrity, contracting out, job security, pensions and the declining circulation of paid daily newspapers.

 

The local has had, and continues to have, success in supporting its members on these issues because of the willingness of members to volunteer their time and use their energy and creativity. Some take time from their careers to work full-time as local president or on local staff. In addition, the local has been well served by the dedication of its staff hired from outside the membership. 

 

Men and women who have spent countless hours in the negotiation and administration of collective agreements and ensuring the infrastructure of the local functioned on a day-today basis.

 

Look elsewhere on this site for examples of SONG contracts which set out wages, vacations, hours of work, overtime and many other workplace issues. The site also provides the names of the dedicated local officers and staff who have served this union since its formation.

Also see:
 
The history of 87M certifications
 
The history of SONG Officers