History of the Newspaper Guild

Page 3

Guild rallies, steps up organizing

The strength of any union resides with its membership, and the loss of 1,200 members was crushing. Additional units were lost when other newspapers folded under pressure of mergers and competition with television. To recover, the Guild knew it needed to consolidate its remaining membership and organize new units.

The local developed an industry-wide organizing plan to bring Guild representation to all newspaper workers in Southern California.

In 1987, the Guild lost a close election at the San Bernardino Sun for what would have been the first major daily newspaper with all employees represented by the union.

But also in 1987, rumblings at the newly renamed Los Angeles Daily News, a newspaper notorious for high turnover and bad management, drew the attention of Local 69. After a two-year treadmill of signing up employees, only to see them quit their jobs, the Guild filed for an election in 1989 for the 200-member editorial unit.

During the election campaign Guild supporters were accused of being “drifters” who had no stake in the newspaper. The staff proved the company wrong by demonstrating its great concern for the paper in their vote of a 2-1 margin for unionization. It took 19 months to win a first contract.

The newspaper, located in the heart of the San Fernando Valley, has became an effective competitor to the Los Angeles Times, often beating the Times into print on major state and Southland news.

In 1997 the Guild won a significant victory – $900,000 in back pay – for 170 Daily News employees who had merit raises illegally withheld by the company from June 1989 to February 1991. The Daily News withheld the pay to punish workers for unionizing; such punishment is a federal offense under the National Labor Relations Act and subsequent court rulings. The National Labor Relations Board carried the case all the way to the Supreme Court. As a result of the Guild-NLRB victory in the Daily News case, some employees received more than $40,000 in back pay (before taxes). A number of workers received $20,000 or more.

Another group of non-union workers contacted LANG complaining about 80 and 100-hour workweeks and arbitrary management. The 30-member office and field staff of Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Local 11 was forced to stage one of the first labor sit-ins since the 1930s to win Guild recognition. After nine tense hours, management conceded that its union did have the right to union recognition. It took several months and a strike deadline before a first contract was achieved in mid-1990.

A second and similar group of workers at Service Employees Local 99 won similar recognition and a contract one year later.

The Press-Telegram

In the 1986 negotiations with the Long Beach Press-Telegram, a fired-up Guild bargaining committee turned the tables on the Knight-Ridder owned newspaper and rallied the members to fight for an improved contract – and prevailed. Later it was revealed that the company was being coached by the notorious Nashville, TN union busting firm, King & Ballow. In 1987, King & Ballow filed the first of three ultimately unsuccessful unit clarification petitions against the Guild that sought to take away Guild protection from the home delivery circulation employees.

The Guild struck back with an aggressive community campaign. In one Guild-produced brochure distributed to thousands in the Long Beach community, the union asked “Why hasn’t the Press-Telegram told you about the union busters on Pine Avenue?” and answered, “Because the Press-Telegram brought them to the Long Beach community.” The Guild’s legal team headed by Los Angeles attorney Ellen Greenstone easily out-classed the boys from Nashville. The Guild prevailed.

The Guild faced another serious deadlock in Press-Telegram bargaining during 1989 and 1990. As part of its strategy to win a fair contract, the union sought the help of the community and launched the most successful subscription campaign in Guild history. In the first few months of 1990, more than 3,000 cards were collected from subscribers authorizing the Guild to cancel their subscriptions and in April, they were dumped out of a mailbag at an annual Knight-Ridder stockholders’ meeting. Within weeks, a new contract was settled.

Today

In 1997, Denver-based MediaNews Group purchased the Long Beach Press-Telegram from Knight-Ridder and fired the staff. Forced to recognize the Guild’s right as the worker’s representative but refusing to recognize its contract, it rehired some of the staff but at half the wage rate.

(Note: Current and former P-T staffers are working to bring this segment up to date.)

LANG’s history is a compilation of information faithfully researched and archived by the late Gene Bradford, a union member for 55 years and who served as TNG Local 69’s only historian, former local president George Laine and current members of the Southern California Media Guild, CWA 9400.