Bay Area Reporters to Drop Bylines to Protest Slow Talks

Reporters at three Bay Area newspapers voted to withhold their bylines from stories in today’s editions as negotiators working to avert a strike at two of the three papers faced a union-imposed deadline of 5 p.m. today.

“This is a way to show our displeasure with the pace of the negotiations,” said one reporter involved in the job action. “While it may seem trivial to readers, our hope is that it will hit home to some of the executives in the glass booths.”

About 4,500 workers represented by 10 unions at the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner and the San Jose Mercury News have been working without a contract since a three-year pact expired at the end of February. Although some peripheral issues have been settled, as of late Thursday the company had yet to present an offer on salary.

Should the talks fail, the unions have targeted the San Francisco papers, published jointly by the San Francisco Newspaper Agency under a joint-operating agreement, for a strike.

“The thinking is that the San Francisco papers would be easier to shut down because San Francisco is a stronger labor town and the plant there is easier to get to,” a Newspaper Guild source said.

“We are down to economic issues,” said Phelps Dewey, a management negotiator who is assistant to the publisher of the Chronicle. “All of the peripheral issues have been taken care of.”

Sources said the chances of a strike waned earlier this week when management reached agreement with Teamsters on work rules and other issues.

Dewey said he expects that the unions would extend the 5 p.m. deadline if progress is being made.

But union members are growing impatient. “We have gone nine months without a contract, and management hasn’t even yet been able to come up with an economic offer,” said Tom Philp, a reporter at the Mercury News and a member of the Newspaper Guild’s executive board.

Still, the negotiations appear to have little of the rancor that has characterized labor relations at the New York Daily News, whose future is in doubt as a result of a bitter strike.