Daily News Offers Contract to Workers

After more than a year of contract talks, the management of the Daily News on Monday offered newsroom employees a contract that fell short of union demands for higher salaries and failed to guarantee minimum levels of union membership.

The offer set the stage for a possible strike at the Woodland Hills-based newspaper after union members vote on the contract Feb. 6. But Carmen Ramos Chandler, head of the Daily News unit of the Los Angeles Newspaper Guild, said the contract gives union negotiators 80% of what they demanded, including procedures for handling employee grievances, maternity leave benefits, more aggressive affirmative-action hiring and on-the-job safety measures.

“This is our first contract,” she said. “I think we have a very good first contract.”

The union represents about 200 Daily News reporters, photographers, librarians, copy editors and other editorial employees. The union voted Jan. 9 to authorize a strike if management failed to make an acceptable contract offer.

Chief among the union complaints is the wage proposal. The Daily News is offering editorial employees with five years’ experience $650 a week for the first year of a three-year contract, with no increase the second year and a 1.5% hike in the third year, said Jim Smith, administrative officer of the guild. The union had asked for $800 a week for experienced reporters but recently lowered its demand to $700 a week, Chandler said. The union also wants a 5% across-the-board annual cost-of-living increase.

Also, the union wants management to guarantee that at least 80% of newly hired employees will join the union. But management wants to leave that choice to employees, Chandler said.

Chandler said union leaders will send copies of the contract offer to employees this week.

The newspaper is owned by financier Jack Kent Cooke of Middleburg, Va., who bought the paper for $176 million from the Tribune Co. of Chicago in 1985.