The Holdout

If the reporters were quick to question Totten, it was because the union president had earned a reputation among his members for being less than forthcoming with information. After the Times Company had made its initial request for cuts last June, company executives, including chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., traveled to Boston for a town hall meeting. During that meeting, a mailroom employee asked about a supposed 10 percent wage drop he’d heard about. Reporters were left slack-jawed. Despite knowing about the requested cuts for a week, Totten had never mentioned them to his members.

Indeed, Totten has long rankled guild members with his lack of interest in communicating much at all. “The union doesn’t seem capable of consistently reaching all of its own members by e-mail,” says one reporter. Notes another, “I had asked at least four times to get on the union listserv and hadn’t. And I think that’s the case with a number of reporters.”

Six days after he learned of the closure threat, Totten finally convened the union’s membership on the evening of Wednesday, April 8. He used the occasion to dig deeper into a hard-line stance he’d already staked out in comments to the media. The lifetime job guarantees, he declared, would not be given up under any circumstance.

With that, Totten cracked open an already festering split in the union. On one side were the many reporters eager to toss the job guarantees overboard if it meant saving the paper. What sense did it make to guard those guarantees, they wondered, if doing so caused the Globe to go out of business? On the other side, guild members who sell advertising—more fearful of having their positions outsourced or rendered obsolete by technology—tend to consider the protections as sacred contract provisions. “It was a beautiful issue to divide us,” says one writer.

With Totten’s position established, fretful reporters began to wonder if the union boss had their best interests at heart. Slack, for one, created a newsroom-wide e-mail list to ensure all were kept apprised of union activities. When Totten sent out a survey to poll members on bargaining priorities, she instructed her colleagues to copy their responses to environment reporter Beth Daley, a newsroom delegate to the guild, just to prevent anything from getting lost in the shuffle. Meanwhile, religion reporter Michael Paulson launched an invitation-only Facebook group to create a forum for staffers to discuss the issues at hand; it quickly grew to 120 members.

Whether in spaces virtual or real, Totten received few favorable reviews from the Globe‘s journalists. Many worried his stubbornness would jeopardize the paper, especially since he had put his foot down on the job guarantees before even considering the survey’s results.

“Sometimes [Totten] seems in over his head,” says one reporter, who, like several others, spoke on condition of anonymity. “His voice mail is always full. He often doesn’t respond to calls or e-mails. And he has a bad habit of insisting that opinions that are different from his are based on ignorance rather than actual disagreement.”

Another puts it more succinctly: “He’s not been effective. I don’t know if that’s because he’s stupid, inept, or just has different goals than the membership.”

Though Totten admits “it would be hard for some of my colleagues to believe,” he originally had hoped to become a reporter when he came to the Globe. In 1980, as a student at Boston State College, he applied for an editorial internship, only to be bumped into advertising. The business hooked him, and he left college to continue on at the newspaper (later finishing his degree and picking up an M.B.A. from Anna Maria College in Paxton). Over a 25-year career, he worked a variety of sales jobs, most recently selling ads for the travel section.

Totten first got active in the union in 2002, and it was a natural fit. His father was a member of the Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association for more than 35 years, his sister was a union representative for the Boston school system, and his grandmother had been a steward for the hotel and telephone workers union “back in a time,” Totten says, “when it wasn’t very popular or easy for a woman to hold such a position.” When guild president Steve Richards stepped down in 2005, citing the strain of the thankless job on his family life, Totten decided to run for the presidency; since nobody else did, he won easily.

Totten ran uncontested again in 2007. Despite drawing the ire of his newsroom colleagues, he’s found plenty of backers who consider him perfect for the job. “I think Dan’s tough,” says Richards. “He’s strong in his opinions and he’s not a bashful, retiring type. He’s going to fight hard for what he believes in.”

For years, newsroom staffers have largely opted out of union affairs. Though they make up 40 percent of the membership, they have just one delegate on the eight-member executive committee. Reporters offer various explanations for their lack of involvement, which seem to boil down to having neither the time nor the interest. (Tellingly, one Globe scribe said all he knew of the union is “they take $20 out of my check.”) After finally tuning in to how their guild president was conducting himself, they found little to like. Many Globe journalists, trained to see nuance in the topics they cover, are philosophically uneasy with Totten’s old-school, line-in-the-sand posture. “Bellicose union sentiment and anticorporate ranting don’t sit well with us,” says one. “This is the 21st century, and these guys are talking like it’s Samuel Gompers Day.”

To those already in line behind Totten, the newsroom’s sudden activism and demands to be heard were off-putting. “Editorial, they don’t really get their hands dirty with this kind of stuff,” says one ad salesman. “[They say,] ‘Gee, are we fully represented?’ But when the elections were taking place, nobody was interested.”