Both Sides in Newspaper Dispute Go Back to Bargaining Table Jan. 3

The San Diego Newspaper Guild and management of the San Diego Union and Tribune newspapers, which last Friday broke off labor contract negotiations, will meet Jan. 3 at the request of a state-appointed labor mediator, company and guild spokesmen said Thursday.

The meeting would be the first since Dec. 22, when an intense, daylong session failed to settle the long-running labor dispute at the San Diego Union and Tribune newspapers. The guild’s 1,100 members, who have worked for two years without a contract, earlier this month authorized a strike at the two papers.

The state’s Mediation and Conciliation Services Department arranged the Jan. 3 meeting, said Herb Klein, editor-in-chief of Copley Press, which publishes the morning Union and afternoon Tribune.

“This was a new development this afternoon,” Klein said Thursday. “We’re hopeful that it will result in some meaningful negotiations that will lead to an early end to the dispute.”

Local guild President Ed Jahn said, “The state mediator is doing what he’s supposed to be doing . . . which is urging both sides to sit down and talk. We’re ready and willing to sit down and bargain any time and anywhere.”

Jahn, who described the Jan. 3 session as a “positive” development, suggested that management at the two San Diego-based papers “has finally realized that morale is just non-existent, that there is a lot of anger and resentment” in the wake of last Friday’s daylong negotiation session, which ended with the two sides far apart on key contract issues.

However, Jahn questioned whether the Jan. 3 meeting could bring the two sides closer on key economic and union-representation issues.

“We don’t trust this company at the bargaining table,” Jahn said. “Too many times in the past they’ve offered some fresh, new, appealing proposal that turned out to be just more of the same old skunk oil.”

The meeting evidently was arranged by David Hart, a state Mediation Conciliation Services officer who has been involved with negotiations at the two San Diego newspapers for about a year. While the two sides agreed to attend the session, an agenda has not been set, Klein and Jahn said.

“We will meet in one room and the company will be in another room,” Jahn said, adding that the mediator will go back and forth with whatever proposals are made.