Homeless Used to Hawk Papers, Groups Charge

Homeless advocates charged Saturday that the Daily News is exploiting the homeless by giving them free copies of the strikebound tabloid to sell.

“The Daily News is using homeless people as the cheapest form of labor to hawk their newspaper. This is the lowest form of exploitation imaginable,” said a statement issued by 14 advocacy groups for the homeless.

“We condemn this action as a cynical maneuver on the part of the Daily News’ management to use homeless people as strike breakers,” the groups said, charging that the homeless were being pitted against the strikers.

A spokeswoman for the tabloid, whose nine unions struck last week in the midst of bitter and unfruitful contract negotiations, denied that the News is recruiting the homeless to sell the paper.

“We know the homeless on occasion are taking copies of the Daily News, which in many cases have been stolen by union members,” said the spokeswoman, Lisa Robinson.

“We won’t stand in the way if the homeless want to earn money selling papers,” she said. “We are providing free samples in many locations around New York. New Yorkers have a right to their hometown paper,” she added.

Robinson later issued a firmer statement saying: “It’s absolutely untrue. We are not giving newspapers to the homeless and asking them to sell them.”

Mary Brosnahan, a spokeswoman for the Coalition for the Homeless, said she talked with about half a dozen homeless people selling copies of the News that they said they received free.

“I think that most of them were getting a quarter for it,” she said. “They were perplexed. They didn’t quite understand what was going on, just that they were given newspapers from out of nowhere.”

The News, unable to distribute many of the 875,000 to 1.6 million papers it prints daily, began giving away 200,000 copies of the newspapers a day.

Robinson insisted that management was “ready and willing” to resume negotiations, while a Newspaper Guild spokesman said the newspaper has refused to schedule meetings.

Meanwhile, union officials were waiting to receive a response from News management to an offer from Jesse Jackson to mediate the return to work of all strikers.

Jackson ignored pleas from the News’ publisher Friday and appeared at a strike rally outside the paper’s 42nd Street building.