Tentative Pact Averts Strike at 3 Bay Area Papers

Three of the Bay Area’s biggest newspapers averted a strike Saturday morning as 10 unions representing 4,500 workers reached tentative agreements on new 45-month contracts that call for modest improvements in wages and benefits.

Terms will not be disclosed until Monday or Tuesday, when ratification votes are scheduled. Still, both sides said they were happy with the outcome.

“No strike!” Carl Hall, shop steward and San Francisco Examiner reporter, told a crowd of cheering workers in the makeshift strike headquarters across the street from the newspaper’s headquarters.

“At this time of terrible economic difficulty for newspapers and other businesses across the country, I think the employers have given us every last cent they could afford to give,” said Douglas Cuthbertson, president of the Northern California Newspaper Guild and chairman of a joint union negotiating committee.

“It was a compromise,” said Richard Jordan, director of labor relations of the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, which publishes the Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle under a joint-operating agreement that combines all non-editorial operations. The other paper involved in the talks was the San Jose Mercury News.

Jordan said the new pact includes “trend-setting language” on video display terminal safety issues and changes to encourage the recruitment of women and minorities. The Guild’s contract also includes a clause prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, which management had initially resisted.

Employees at the papers had been working without contracts since February. But the talks, negotiators said, grew serious only after the unions targeted the two San Francisco papers for a strike at 5 p.m. Friday.

The date, coinciding with the start of the Christmas advertising season, was selected to maximize union leverage.

But while negotiations were tense, at no time did they approach the rancor of labor relations at the New York Daily News, whose future is in doubt as a result of a bitter, ongoing walkout.

Amid signs of progress, the unions extended the deadline to 6 p.m. and then “stopped the clock” in a last-ditch effort to prevent the first San Francisco newspaper strike since a 55-day walkout in 1968.

Negotiators worked through the night but as Saturday dawned labor and management remained far apart on salaries and benefits.

Jordan said the unions then issued an ultimatum:

“Unless they had an acceptable final offer from us by 9 a.m., that was the end of the negotiations,” he said. “I was convinced they were ready” to strike.

Union members confirmed Jordan’s account.

At 8:30 a.m., “we started calling in members for their picket assignments,” said Ike Newman, a Teamsters Union driver.

Management’s final offer broke the stalemate and the new pacts were signed by bleary-eyed negotiators at 10:13 a.m.