STRIKE

What better event than a newspaper strike to show the gulf between the assumptions of the American labor movement and the realities of the information economy? In addition to a case study of a rowdy New York newspaper strike, complete with chomped stogies and all forms of legal and illegal intimidation and trash-talk, Vigilante situates the New York Daily News strike of 1990 in the context of a postindustrial economy—in which, increasingly, it's the lap-top instead of the lathe that workers are being asked to use. Labor leaders, not just moralizing management, are asking themselves whether they could better serve their unions by emphasizing ``worker productivity'' at least as much as ``worker solidarity.'' New York Newsday columnist Vigilante argues that the labor movement, one of many products of the industrial revolution, must ``join the post-industrial future with a vengeance.''