Journalists Fired for Union Organizing:

Story and photo by R. Robertson

For ten months Bay Area News Group (BANG) executives threatened journalists with pay freezes and cuts in benefits if they organized a unit for collective bargaining on pay, benefits and work conditions. Despite a vicious anti-union campaign by management, non-supervisory news workers voted in June to form a unit of the Northern California Media Workers Guild.

On a black Friday less than one month later at least 20 journalists who had been visibly supportive of organizing a union were summarily terminated.

Last week the Guild filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board, calling the firings retaliatory and citing other anti-union actions against the newly formed unit.

The 230-member Bay Area News Group East Bay (BANG-EB) bargaining unit includes the Oakland Tribune and other East Bay papers, as well as the San Mateo County Times on the peninsula. Among those terminated was Sara Steffens, newly elected chair of the unit and one of the main Guild organizers.

"I think they wanted me out of the newsroom," Steffans said. "They wanted to keep me from continuing to engage co-workers as we push for our first contract and they hoped this would send a message to scare people away from further union activity. But they made a big mistake -- so far it's only made our newsroom understand why it's important to have a contract to protect us."

Union representative Carl Hall said the company showed a clear pattern of anti-union discrimination with the retaliatory terminations and cited other key violations by management. The Guild charges that the company discontinued its merit pay system without bargaining with the union and solicited employees to waive their rights under the National Labor Relations Act in order to be eligible for the severance package.