Times printers vote to unionize
Los Angeles Times press operators narrowly approved representation by the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, according to union election results tallied Saturday by the National Labor Relations Board.
The 140-131 vote in favor of the Teamsters’ Graphic Communications Conference represented a rare victory for organized labor against a newspaper with a long history of antipathy toward unions.
Organizers and pressroom workers whooped and hollered with delight not long after the votes were counted at the downtown Los Angeles offices of the federal labor agency.
“We finally got ‘em. It took 40 years!” shouted Marty Keegan, the Teamsters’ lead organizer in the election.
He was referring to a 1967 election in which Times press operators voted in a union, only to cast it out again three years later. Workers rejected five subsequent union organizing drives from 1990 to 2002.
Union activists celebrated the victory, planned for contract talks and discussed the possibility of expanding their foothold at the newspaper -- perhaps by organizing newsroom employees.
On a Times-sponsored Web page Saturday, Publisher David Hiller expressed disappointment with the outcome of the vote and said The Times would review its options with its attorneys.
“Under any and all circumstances, however, The Times and our employees will make good on our commitment to publishing a great newspaper every day, as we have for 125 years,” he said in a separate statement.
The voting Thursday and Friday at Times plants in downtown Los Angeles and in Costa Mesa came as the newspaper’s parent, Tribune Co. of Chicago, continued its fourth month of deliberations about whether to sell or break up the company.
Industry analysts have described preliminary bidding for Tribune as tepid, although initial expressions of interest have been registered by several private investment firms, newspaper giant Gannett Co. and partners Eli Broad and Ron Burkle, Los Angeles billionaires.
Tribune has asked for formal bids by Jan. 17. Among the company’s other holdings are KTLA Channel 5, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Cubs.
Keegan said Times’ pressroom workers appeared to be most concerned about job security in a time of retrenchment for the newspaper industry. They also hope for better benefits and wages, which stand at about $61,000 a year for a journeyman press operator.
The union organizer expressed hope that Tribune would try to reach a contract agreement with the Teamsters quickly “because any new owner is going to want to know what the contract is going to look like.”
Alan Mutter, a San Francisco newspaper analyst and investor, noted that to cut costs, some newspaper companies have turned to rivals to print their papers. He also pointed to the recent move by the San Francisco Chronicle to have the Hearst Corp. daily printed at a plant that a Canadian firm will build and run in the Bay Area.
Mutter said it would “make a lot more sense” for Times management to delay contract discussions and “let the new owner figure it out.”
Teamsters organizers said they would survey all production employees to set priorities leading into contract talks.
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