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Work History

I started working for The Detroit News in 1977. I spent 3 ½ years as a Part-time Jumper, which is a Drivers helper. I loaded and helped Drivers unload their trucks. In 1981, I went full-time as a Driver. My first route was working with the "5 AM'ers," three days a week we delivered "reds", which was the comic section of the Sunday paper. I also worked Friday night, driving a "Relay", which consisted of a combination of filling newspaper racks, delivering to stores and taking papers to substations where carriers picked up their papers for home delivery. In 1986, The Detroit News was bought by Gannett; we thought they were our saviors because The News was the subject of a hostile takeover attempt. Little did we know that soon our lives would change. The Detroit News and The Detroit Free Press announced that they wanted to form a Joint Operating Agreement (JOA). The reason was that the Free Press was in danger of failing because of the long term fight with The News. For the most part, News employees did not want the JOA and The Free Press employees did. After a long fight, the papers prevailed and a JOA was formed. I was now an employee of Detroit Newspapers Agency (DNA), which is a service company for the two papers. In the years I worked for the DNA, I had about three route changes a year, where previously I had one route for 9 years. On July 13, 1995, six unions went out on an unfair labor strike against the DN. (they changed their name to Detroit Newspapers the year before) The DN had wanted us out on strike to try and break the Unions. In February of 1997, the unions made an offer to return to work; the company was to get rid of all the replacement workers and take back all striking workers. The company refused and said that they would take back people only as needed, a violation of the law. This was now legally a Lock-out. Later that year, we got part of what we wanted, the papers were found GUILTY of Unfair Labor Practices. The Locked out workers started their own weekly newspaper, which has been a thorn in the papers side (a big one) called The Detroit Sunday Journal. On July 19th, 1999, I returned to the paper as a UNION CDL Driver. We are still waiting for a contract!  On November 19, 1999, The Detroit Sunday Journal printed it's last issue.  It is a great loss to the Labor community in Detroit.  On December 17, 2000, Teamster Local 372 and 2040 were the last two unions to ratify a contract with Detroit Newspapers.  It was a case of vote no and possibly lose our unions or vote yes and accept crummy contracts.  We chose to live to fight again.

The Monday after I went out on strike, I started working as a temporary part-time worker for National Technical Systems, Detroit Division (NTS DETROIT). I did just about everything as a Maintenance Technician (Janitor) for the next six months. I was asked if I would like to learn how to set up, run and monitor tests in the Dynamometer Department, I was then hired full time. We test axles, transfer cases, transmissions, alternators, torque convertors, U-Joints, Propshafts and just about anything that spins or has gears in it.