Tentative Pay Pact Reached With 3 Papers in Bay Area

Negotiators for three major Bay Area newspapers and 10 unions reached a tentative settlement on economic issues for a new three-year contract late Friday and continued talks into the early morning hours in hopes of resolving remaining outstanding issues.

The issues left unresolved are “individual union problems . . . mainly work rules and language regarding the contract,” said Leon Olson, Conference of Newspaper Unions representative.

No terms of the tentative agreement with the San Francisco Chronicle and the Examiner, as well as the San Jose Mercury News, were disclosed, but Olson said he believed “our members will accept it.”

‘Can Live With It’

“Both sides gave a little. Like a lot of contracts, I don’t think either side is happy, so probably both sides can live with it,” he said.

If any of the 10 unions encounter contract problems they cannot resolve, Olson said, all 10 unions will strike. There will be no separate settlements with any locals, he said.

The unions sought a raise of 10% for each year of the contract. Management offered a wage freeze for the first 18 months of the pact, followed by an increase of roughly $25 a week for the remainder of the contract. Current pay for reporters and photographers ranges from $433 to $711 a week. Teamsters make $16 an hour.

A federal mediator and San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein entered the marathon bargaining session at the Meridien Hotel here as the unions first extended their 4:59 p.m. deadline one hour and then stopped the clock indefinitely at 5:35 p.m.

Expresses Hope

“Hopefully, we won’t have to start it again,” Olson said before the tentative agreement was reached. “If and when we have to start the clock again, the strike deadline will still be 5:59.”

“It’s getting down to the last half of the ninth inning,” said Walter L. Johnson, secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Labor Council.

The Examiner, the Chronicle and the Mercury News are three of the Bay Area’s four major daily newspapers. The fourth, the Oakland Tribune, is not involved in the bargaining and was planning to increase the number of papers it sells in San Francisco in the event of a strike.

Reporters, truckers and various production workers have been working without a contract since June. Trying to avert a strike, union and management negotiators worked until 11 p.m. Thursday and resumed talks Friday at 9 a.m., breaking only briefly for lunch.

While neither the Chronicle nor the Examiner announced contingency plans to publish in the face of a strike, the Knight-Ridder-owned San Jose paper called reporters and copy editors in early Friday and paid them at higher rates to get a Saturday morning paper on the presses before the strike deadline.

Security Increased

Executives at the Mercury News have been trained to run the presses and perform other tasks involved in producing a paper. Unions at the San Jose paper moved in a trailer and portable toilets for pickets. At the same time, management increased security at the plant.

The paper is delivered by Teamster truckers, but several union sources said the paper had independent truckers ready to substitute for strikers.

There were no apparent contingency plans at either of the San Francisco papers where editors said they did not really expect a strike. But Bob McCormick, senior vice president of the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which is representing management in the talks, said that in the event of a walkout, the Chronicle and the Examiner would probably attempt to publish.

Chronicle Is Biggest

The morning Chronicle, the area’s largest paper, has a circulation of 545,622. The afternoon Examiner has a circulation of 124,314. The Mercury News, which has grown as San Jose and the adjacent Silicon Valley have boomed in recent years, has a circulation of 261,668 on weekdays and 306,069 on Sundays.

Mark A. Stein reported from San Francisco and Tracey Kaplan from San Jose. Times staff writers Dan Morain in San Francisco and Jack Jones and Edward J. Boyer in Los Angeles also contributed to this story.