SOCAL MEDIA GUILD HISTORY

Immediate Past President, Merger Committee Chair and Acting Administrative Officer

It was, some say, the union that "killed" Hearst's Los Angeles Herald-Examiner.

Others, however, argue it was the agent of change that vastly improved pay, benefits and working conditions for all media workers in the Los Angeles region.

And now that history is part of CWA Local 9400.

In June 2001, members of the 64-year-old Southern California Media Guild -- historically known as the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild -- voted virtually unanimously to merge with 9400; the combination was finalized later that summer.

Thus drew to a close a storied -- some would say infamous -- chapter in SoCal media history. Not surprisingly, news of the merger went unreported in local mass media -- the very media that the local so profoundly affected.

And what a history it was, both glorious and galling, full of victories and ironies.

The local founded in 1936 in the barn of comic actor Edward Everett Horton's San Fernando Valley ranch and was chartered in 1937 as the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild (LANG), Local 69, of the American Newspaper Guild (ANG, founded in late 1933 and later renamed The Newspaper Guild, TNG, when Canadian locals were added).

But the local's founding was presaged by one of the most ironic of circumstances, according to the late LANG historian Gene Bradford, a member for more than 55 years: At the turn of the century, labor activists petitioned William Randolph Hearst, owner of the very successful San Francisco Examiner, to start a Los Angeles newspaper with a union that would offer competition to the very anti-union L.A. Times. Indeed, Hearst opened the L.A. Examiner in November 1903. But once the local Guild was founded, it would be in a long-running battle with that very paper, which created a sham company union.

In the words of Bradford, who was witness to many of the events, "The formative years of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild were very hectic. The guild demanded contracts at each newspaper, often with harrowing results: The Hollywood Citizen-News fired its chief editorial writer, Roger Johnson, who had been elected (LANG's) first president.... Johnson immediately took the Citizen-News out on strike. That first strike by the upstart union produced some astonishing results: Motion picture celebrities, linked arm-in-arm with members of the American Federation of Musicians, joined guild members on the picket line to focus instense national attention on the strike.... The Citizen-News management was unable to withstand the daily spotlight of negative public opinion and soon capitulated."

That unqualified first success sparked the guild's drive for contracts and organizing elsewhere and brought journeyman reporters to the top of the pay scale among all reporters in the Southland.

With the national guild's move into the Committee for Industrial Organization, it was able to broaden its reach by organizing vertically and industrially, not just by craft. In addition, all contract negotiations were open to rank-and-file members. As a result, there was a reduction in strikes and strike threats.

But that didn't mean those were tools of the past: The Huntington Park Bulletin and the Rodgers & McDonald Press force the guild to call strikes and set up picket lines before finally gaining contracts (R&M workers later aligned with GCIU graphics union, and the company continued to be rigorously anti-union).

However, contracts were peacefully arrived at with the Daily Racing Form, the Garden Grove Evening News, the News-Times, the News-Advertiser, the Huntington Park Signal, the San Pedro News-Pilot and later the Long Beach Press-Telegram plus others. Victories in later years also included such papers as the New York Times' Santa Barbara News-Press, the San Fernando Valley's Daily News (not to be confused with old Daily News) and the San Pedro Random Lengths.

While the P-T and the DRF remained units in the local at the time of its merger into 9400, most of the abovementioned have faded into history, the result of absorption by other papers, unilateral shutdowns, competition from broadcasting (long before the Internet), poor management practices, economic hard times, and so forth. In virtually no case was unionization and specifically the guild to blame for any of the papers' demise, contrary to what some of the managers claimed in the past.

High on the list of defunct papers is the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, which the Hearst Corp. ran. The first major strike against the paper was in 1946, when the company changed its policy from meaningful negotiation to stonewalling. After three months, it capitulated. Twenty years later, the guild struck the Her-Ex again, but this time was the precursor to the devastating 1967 strike: Publisher George Hearst Jr. announced he would get rid of all unions at his plant, stalled talks for nine months and set up scabs in various hotels. On Dec. 15, all nine unions went on strike -- a strike that would last 22 years. Scabs filled in, but the paper steadily lost advertising and circulation, plunging almost immediately from its high of 750,000 to below 400,000 and continuing to decline thereafter. Eventually, even the SCABS UNIONIZED! But the corporation, in its spiteful way, instead decided to just shut it down and walk away.

Meanwhile, LANG had dwindled to just two units and less than 300 members, especially with the loss of its 1,200 Her-Ex brothers and sisters. In the mid- 1980s, it was galvanized by organizing and a triumphant series of battles against the notorious anti-union law firm King & Ballow, which subjected the local to several "unit clarifications" (all of which K&B lost) at the Press-Telegram. The local also organized the Daily News and News-Press as well as staffs of such unions at HERE (hotel and restaurant workers) and SEIU (non-teaching school workers). In addition it came tantalizing close to winning at the San Bernardino Sun and made a run at the Las Vegas Review-Journal and while also making another of its periodic concerted efforts at the L.A. Times. The local's strength and resources further grew with the national union's merger into CWA.

But a series of developments in the mid-1990s was to prove crucial. It was discovered that funds that should have gone to pay payroll taxes and workers' comp policies had instead been diverted to some of the organizing efforts; as a result, staff were laid off or fired, finances were crippled, and a bitter battle ensued that ended in a series of lawsuits and a distracting set of internal trials (which led to the national union permanently expelling one of the local's former executive administrators, known in other unions at the business agent). While all this was going on, the local was battling the P-T's owner, the Knight-Ridder corporation, which was under new management and becoming aggressively antagonistic toward the guild after decades of relatively good relations; K-R even tried to get its hands on P-T workers' pension plan money as K-R attempted to inflate stock value by slashing workforce.

Then, in late 1997, the same that year the local turned 60, Knight-Ridder sold the still-profitable paper for basically a song to William Dean Singleton's privately held but heavily debt-leveraged MediaNews Group, which is known for slashing staff, pay, benefits, working conditions and in-depth news coverage. True to form, the result was the elimination of at least 200 workers, reduction of wages by as much as 50% for those left in the plant, elimination of vacation, sick pay and even bereavement leave, shutdown of printing at the P-T plant, and so forth. At about the same time, MediaNews bought the Daily News -- with the secret help of the Los Angeles Times' owner -- and took charge of several other local newspapers as well. In all, MediaNews now controls the P-T and Daily News (both of which still have guild contracts, but far worse ones than the Cadillac plan that previously was at the P-T) as well as the San Bernardino Sun, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Pasadena Star-News, Whittier Daily News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Redlands Daily Facts -- all of which are the targets of or ripe for organizing.

Meanwhile, the Copley chain forced a decertification of the San Diego local at the Union-Tribune by an extraordinarily narrow margin; what was left of that local was merged into the Los Angeles local, which -- in recognition of the San Diego unit's presence and the MediaNews Group "cluster" of papers as well as the expansion of "newspaper" workers into cyberspace and other realms -- changed its name at the turn of the century to the Southern California Media Guild (SCMG).

Finally, recognizing it had to take on re-organizing in San Diego and the new tasks of organizing the MediaNews holdings as well as Internet and other workers, plus acknowledging all that had come before (the lasting devastation of the Her-Ex strike, the internal financial difficulties, the change in media due to mergers and new media, etc.), the local realized it did not have the resources to strengthen and grow -- and that it needed a partner to succeed. Thus came the merger of its units into 9400 -- and the end of LANG/SCMG as a standalone local.