This is the "real time" story of a union organizing campaign, pervaded with the ideals of the First Amendment as carried out by our Fourth Estate. As was noted in a
Diary by
E Love, management at the Santa Barbara News-Press -- a venerable, well-read long-established local institution serving a wealthy town with Spanish-tiled adobe charm 90 minutes from LA, and studded with prominent celebs - has been on a rampage, trashing the wall that's supposed to separate the paper's editorial stance from the news reporting in the field, leading to the mass departure of editors, followed thereafter by a continued rush to the exits by veteran columnists and reporters.
The perception in the newsroom has been that the "eccentric" divorcee billionaire control freak Wendy McCaw wants to run the news as well as the opinion writing. As the NY Times described the goings-on over a month ago:
Wendy P. McCaw, the reclusive multimillionaire owner of The Santa Barbara News-Press, is at war with her own staff. What started as a conflict over journalistic ethics has in the past week escalated into a full-blown rebellion.
Staffers have been marching out the door, accusing her of interfering with their editorial independence. When she published her explanation of the departures as an expression of bias in the reporting staff on Thursday, even more quit. On Friday, her staff -- or what remained of it -- held a rally outside the newspaper building, where some 30 reporters and editors, dressed in black, put duct tape over their mouths, to represent the owner's gag order issued last week.
Typical of arrogant management's penchant for "blaming the victim", McCaw was quoted in the NY Times saying:
''This is not a freedom of the press issue, or of intimidation of the newsroom,'' she said. ''There were personality differences in the newsroom, and the people who didn't want to be there are not there any longer.''
Meanwhile, the litigious unidirectional libertarian McCaw has sent "cease and desist" letters to some of her departed editors in the hope of silencing them, and has sued two of them (so far), including Jerry Roberts, no doubt for the same purpose.
As one rival local newspaper put it in an editorial challenging the News-Press' actions of the last two months, "If you can't fight the truth, then silence the truth. . . . When your editor, managing editor, deputy managing editor, metro editor, business editor, sports editor and 46-year veteran columnist resign en masse, saying basic journalistic tenets are being violated, and when eight more journalists subsequently follow them out the door, something is wrong."
Often in such a pungent atmosphere union organizing campaigns are born and flourish, and so it was in this case. The Graphics Communications Conference of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters ("GCC-IBT") was called in, and I was asked to represent the Union as legal counsel. A great majority of the newsroom employees signed authorization cards saying they wanted the union to represent them in collective bargaining; it was not about money, not about getting state of the art computers, not about getting more reportorial "perks". It was about fundamental, journalistic integrity and rebuilding the wall. In order to do that, the reporters needed a voice in the workplace; they had tried to reason with management, and they saw the result.
On July 13, the reporters asked management to voluntarily recognize the GCC-IBT as their bargaining representative, and it refused July 17, responding with the usual pseudo-sincere management trope of wanting to ensure that the "true" voice of the workers is heard, through the device of the secret ballot election conducted by the National Labor Relations Board.
We know what that means: "We, management, want the opportunity to get our anti-union campaign in place so we can intimidate and coerce employees while the NLRB's slow process grinds on, to the frustration of the employees who have - in this case in particular- vigorously manifested their strong desire to have a union." This is standard fare for anti-union employers, who routinely seek delay through exploitation of the cracks and crevices in the NLRB's procedures, to provide themselves the opportunity to intimidate workers through hardball tactics, and at the very least raise questions and doubts about the union and remind the employees who is the boss. Thus, Cornell University scholar Kate Bronfenbrenner studied hundreds of organizing campaigns. In her report Uneasy Terrain: The Impact of Capital Mobility on Workers, Wages and Union Organizing, she found:
* Ninety-two percent of private-sector employers, when faced with employees who want to join together in a union, force employees to attend closed-door meetings to hear anti-union propaganda; 80 percent require supervisors to attend training sessions on attacking unions; and 78 percent require that supervisors deliver anti-union messages to workers they oversee.
* Seventy-five percent hire outside consultants to run anti-union campaigns, often based on mass psychology and distorting the law.
* Half of employers threaten to shut down partially or totally if employees join together in a union.
* In 25 percent of organizing campaigns, private-sector employers illegally fire workers because they want to form a union.
* Even after workers successfully form a union, in one-third of the instances, employers never negotiate a contract.
Similarly, studies have shown that
Employers who are so inclined may use NLRB procedures and legal doctrines to create delays and make collective bargaining appear futile so that employees will eventually abandon their struggle to form a union. The bottom line: as Richard Freeman puts it, "the National Labor Relations Act . . . has institutionalized a process that effectively gives management near veto power over whether or not workers become organized" The consequences have been devastating for workers' rights. According to a February 2005 Peter Hart survey, among nonunion workers 53 percent-or some 57 million workers-want union representation in their workplaces but are unable to have it under current law.
Wishing to avoid the delay and concomitant mounting attacks on employees, who had already been resigning in frustration at management abuse, the Union continued its campaign to pressure the newspaper to recognize it without the NLRB's involvement. The effort included (as noted above) the spectacle of reporters publicly wearing black covering their mouths with duct tape to symbolize the "gag order" to which they were subject, and beginning a "cancel my subscription" effort in the community.
One nauseating response to the community uproar was McCaw's tin-eared hiring of the cranky and discredited scold, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, to write biweekly anti-union "news" columns and other sanctimonious rants well-known to listeners of her radio show.
When the Union's efforts did not result in voluntary recognition despite its clear majority support, the GCC-IBT filed an election petition on August 10 with the NLRB. The agency scheduled a quick hearing for August 17 to determine what employee voting eligibility issues needed to be determined before the election. Management lawyer wizardry and heavy-handedness, however, began immediately. The SBNP's first set of lawyers departed, followed by a second set shortly thereafter, gaining an easy bit of delay. Management changed reporters' assignments without consulting with them in advance, making such curious moves as taking the coveted Santa Barbara City beat from a very experienced reporter and awarding it to a raw rookie replacement who was likely to be anti-union, removed another reporter with degrees in science from the environmental scene -- an important beat especially in eco-sensitive Santa Barbara -- and taking an experienced, well-connected political reporter off his beat barely three months before the election. In addition, on the eve of the already once-postponed hearing (August 23), the News-Press filed a frivolous, patently unsupported unfair labor practice charge claiming that supervisors had tainted the Union's representation effort by helping solicit Union support, which if true, would have been improper, since supervisors, as putative representatives of management, may be viewed as acting coercively if they advocate for a union. Management filed that charge without a shred of evidence to support it, simply in order to obtain further procedural delay. In that regard, the News-Press succeeded, since the NLRB's office viewed such a charge as an automatic obstacle to holding the hearing, even without any factual or evidentiary support, which to this day, management has not provided.
The employees for their part, displayed boundless courage. On August 24, for example, about a dozen reporters peacefully attempted to deliver to Mrs. McCaw a letter demanding that their rights to organize be respected, and that management not engage in further obstructionist tactics. For their trouble, they all have received notice from management that they will be suspended for two days for engaging in activity protected by federal labor law. This coercive move was in keeping with typical management bulldozing strategy of attrition, with the hope in this case that more employees would depart, to be replaced by new employees less supportive of the Union. In addition, management has stripped one prominent union-supporting reporter of the weekly commentary column she had written for four years. While management disingenuously stated it did so to clear out the "bias" among the reporters and was doing away with all opinion columns by staff, it nevertheless recently published an "opinion" piece of one of its favored staffers, who echoed management's anti-employee stance.
The drama that has fueled Santa Barbara's cocktail party summer circuit may be reaching one natural peak: the Union has fought through management's threats and stall tactics, and with the third set of management lawyers, has arrived at a date for an NLRB election: September 27, 2006.
The Union fully expects that the next two weeks will bring out the worst in SBNP management, but nevertheless expects to prevail in this election. That achievement alone, as explained above, is against the usual odds, because the newsroom employees are supremely unified and derive strength from each other and their leadership.
To be sure, as experienced hands at the tiller, the Union leadership well knows that that expected success will just lead to the next, most important phase: sitting down at the table to bargain with management that has amply demonstrated that it wants no union voice at the workplace whatsoever. To succeed at the table then, will require persistent employee tenacity and strength, and continued community support.
Anyone interested in helping out or just voicing their support should go to [http://savethenewspress.com/ savethenewspress.com] for more information.