Labor

Life After Layoff: Two Sacramento Reporters Speak Out

2009-10-29T00:55:56Z

Winter and spring of 2009 upended two Sacramento journalists. Just ask Sena Christian, 28, and Walter Yost, 61.

The employers of both working reporters fired them this year. Christian covered the environment. Yost’s beat was education.

Their unemployment is part of a newsroom trend across the country. Layoffs in journalism rose at a rate of 22 percent per month in the one-year period which ended this August, reports Unity: Journalists of Color, Inc., “a strategic alliance advocating fair and accurate news coverage about people of color, and aggressively challenging the industry to staff its organizations at all levels to reflect the nation’s diversity.”

That downsizing of journalists compares with an economy-wide job-loss rate of 8 percent a month for the same 12 months. Further, according to the U.S. Labor Department, layoffs for news analysts, reporters and correspondents doubled between second-quarter 2008 and second-quarter 2009.

Christian, a former full-time reporter for 18 months at the weekly Sacramento News & Review, owned by Chico Community Publishing, Inc., was “not completely shocked” at her in-person firing by Editor Melinda Welsh in February.

“I knew that the paper like all papers was struggling,” Christian said.

Rapid technological change and a housing crash are driving down revenues for newspapers. The popularity of digital media is attracting paid readership from print media. At the same time, the bursting of the housing bubble has wiped out wealth and buying power for businesses and households, according to Dean Baker, author, economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC.

Yost, a full-time Sacramento Bee reporter for 16 and a half years, got a phone call from the paper’s editor, Melanie Sill, about his March layoff.

“It didn’t totally surprise me,” he said, noting his job loss was one of 128 Bee-wide. The paper’s newsroom accounted for 29 job cuts.

“These layoffs followed-up our labor contract negotiations with the McClatchy Company (which owns The Bee and 29 other daily newspapers),” said Yost. "I had sat at the bargaining table as vice chair of the Newspaper Guild, Local 39521, Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO. We had been forewarned that there would be serious cutbacks. Frankly, all of us were startled at how big it was.”

Labor union rights and wrongs at the workplace were not factors in Christian’s layoff. SN&R is a non-union employer. The work force, company employees and freelance contributors, labors at-will.

This means employment is for no defined length of time. Further, the employer and employee are legally free to end their labor arrangement at any time for any reason.

Currently, Christian and Yost receive state unemployment insurance. Christian gets a $700 UI check every two weeks and is on her first six-month extension of jobless benefits.

Yost receives every two-week UI checks of $750. The beginning of his first six-month extension of UI benefits draws near.

Currently, Christian is pursuing journalism as a freelancer for the SN&R and other news outlets. It’s a challenge to make ends meet, she said. Her pay is about 80 percent less as an SN&R freelancer than as a full-time reporter, with no employer-provided health-care insurance. She pays for that coverage now.

“That’s a little hard to swallow,” Christian said. “What I’m making is not enough to pay even half of my rent now.”

She freelanced for 6 months at the paper before landing a full-time slot.

Out of necessity, she has branched out as a freelance journalist. Her work appeared in the Missoula Independent and Monterey County Weekly recently.

Yost has not been reporting since his layoff from The Bee. It’s not for a lack of trying. He has been looking for new journalism employment.

However, “those jobs are just not out there” Yost said. “A representative at a major newspaper laughed in my face when I asked about openings for reporter jobs now or in the future.”

Meanwhile, Yost is active with the Northern California Media Workers Guild of The Sacramento Bee. He is a non-voting staff person involved in bargaining talks with the McClatchy Co. for a new labor contract. “It might be the most important contract for Guild members at The Bee since the 1970s,” Yost said. The union’s negotiations with the company begin Nov. 2.

Speaking of important things for reporters and readers, Christian is concerned about the effects of a worsening economy on the profession of journalism.

“Publications are getting more desperate to survive, and that might lead to the break-down of the wall between editorial and sales," she said. "This is a conflict of interest that really disturbs me.”

In theory, this “wall” separates a news outlet’s main sources of revenue (such as advertisers) from shaping editorial output, or what reporters write. Therefore, a journalist is free, say, to cover a company’s business practices even if it buys ad space in the same publication.

What actually happens in practice in newsrooms? The answers are subject to debate.

In their 1988 book "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media," Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman present case studies of news reporting and develop an alternate theory of press censorship.

They argue that there are filters that news must pass through to be newsworthy. One filter is a publication’s advertisers. Crucially, ad revenues fund a news firm’s daily operations, i.e., salaries, supplies, etc.

For Yost, Bee journalist layoffs bode ill for the paper’s role as a daily watchdog in the public’s interest.

“The loss to the Sacramento community and beyond is that there are fewer reporters covering corruption in state and local governments," Yost said. "This is not a left or right thing.”

According to a spring essay by John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney in The Nation on the crisis in U.S. journalism, if a press watchful of power and wealth is neither a conservative or liberal issue, perhaps it is time to view journalism as a public utility.

That viewpoint assumes, of course, that a political democracy such as the U.S. requires a free press to inform its citizens for reasons of open government. Therefore, with journalism in a kind of death-spiral today, the role of the press is too vital to American democracy to remain a private asset, the essay states.

Back in Sacramento, Christian and Yost, down but not out, are surviving a severe print media shake-out. As the owners of the industry strive to create profitable ways to produce, distribute and consume news, nothing suggests that this process is nearing an end. Christian and Yost’s lives after their newspaper layoffs are proof of that.

One thing is clear. They are not alone.

New health care union grows in Sacramento

2009-04-12T14:36:51Z

April 12, 2009
New health care union grows in Sacramento
By Seth Sandronsky

Employees at nursing homes in Sacramento, Woodland and Pacifica, operated by North American Health Care, Inc., left the Service Employees International Union to join the new National Union of Healthcare Workers on March 17.

“The new union tells us the truth about our contract negotiations with the employer,” said Ulette Bloomer, a cook and union steward on the night shift at Valley Skilled Nursing Home, by Sacramento’s UCD Medical Center. “SEIU was not honest about that and kept giving us the runaround.”

The former SEIU employees, 350 in all, are the first-ever members of NUHW. They will remain covered by the current collective bargaining agreement with North American Health Care, Inc. Meanwhile, the NUHW’s elected bargaining team will negotiate a new agreement with the for-profit employer.

To choose NUHW, the previously SEIU-represented employees signed petitions in a majority sign-up, a National Labor Relations Board-approved process. Shirley Campbell of the State Mediation and Conciliation Service, a neutral third party, validated the signatures of the employees who have joined the new health care union.

NUHW formed on January 28, a day after SEIU placed its United Healthcare Workers-West local of 150,000 Northern California members into a trusteeship, a legal move to seize financial and political control of the affiliate. SEIU President Andy Stern, not the rank-and-file, propelled the maneuver. The trusteeship merged three California affiliates of caregivers into a single local statewide under Stern’s appointed leaders.

Because of the trusteeship, all UHW’s elected leaders, beginning with Sal Rosselli, its former president, were removed. Rosselli, in a drawn-out conflict with Stern over health-care reform and union growth in California, was accused of misusing members’ money. He disputes the charges of financial mismanagement.

Rosselli is the current president of NUHW. Other UHW officials such as John Borsos from Sacramento, also ousted in the SEIU trusteeship, join Rosselli in leading NUHW.

“NUHW is a splinter group led by the disgraced and ousted former leaders of UHW,” said Michelle Ringuette, SEIU spokeswoman. SEIU, with 2 million members, is the biggest union in the Change to Win partnership. CTW’s six million members in seven unions departed the AFL-CIO in 2005.

Over 95,000 SEIU workers in and out of health care statewide have petitioned the NLRB to join NUHW, according to Sadie Crabtree, spokeswoman for the fledgling union. The most recent SEIU-represented petitioners range from health care workers to childcare, public safety and sanitation employees in Monterey County (Salinas), she said.

Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento ssandronsky@yahoo.com

Sacramento County and Blue Diamond: Management tactics when employees organize

2009-11-09T07:19:55Z

Efforts to form labor unions in Sacramento shed light on what public- and private-sector workers face in organizing across the United States.

The Sacramento County Management Association is made up of more than one-third of all nonunion managers in the county. To gauge their interest in forming a union, the board of SCMA has given 1,172 managers the option to vote on forming a union by signing cards indicating their choice. The process began Sept. 26. Approximately 300 cards must be collected by mid-December to hold a vote to choose a union in early 2010.

Unrepresented Sacramento County managers oversee employees who deliver services in airports, courts, health, parks and public works, among other agencies.

Sue Elliott, chief of administrative services for the Sacramento County district attorney’s office, is president of the association. What set the SCMA vote process into motion was a straw poll at a spring luncheon indicating that 46 percent of those attending were interested in forming a union, she said.

“This decision is predicated upon the fact that the county has called into question management benefits that were given in lieu of pay raises over the years,” she said. Those benefits range from cost-of-living-adjustments to sick and vacation days and 401(k) retirement plans.

Employees who belong to a union have collective-bargaining agreements requiring that any changes to their contracts be negotiated. So, in Sacramento County, nonunion managers are at higher risk of job, wage and benefit cuts than their union counterparts.

County executive Terry Schutten declined to comment on SCMA’s move. Steve Keil, the county’s director of labor relations, said Sacramento County has "no position on SCMA exercising its rights under the law.”

The Blue Diamond Growers almond processing plant in Sacramento offers a glimpse of what can happen when private-sector workers seek representation.

According to Blue Diamond employee, Frank Garcia, after the International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 17 began to organize workers five years ago, Blue Diamond hired a firm to make employees fearful of voting to join the union. To date, the plant has no unions.

Professor Kate Bronfenbrenner is director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Her research shows that from 1999 and to 2003, private employers used nearly five times the number of anti-union tactics as public employers.

"In 48 percent of public-sector campaigns,” she notes in her 2009 report “No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing,” the employer did not campaign at all —no letters, no leaflets, and no meetings." <http://epi.3cdn.net/edc3b3dc172dd1094f_0ym6ii96d.pdf>

The Blue Diamond campaign appears to match U.S. workplace trends. American employers more than doubled their use of anti-union tactics against employees attempting to form unions between 1999 and 2003, according to Bronfenbrenner. In “No Holds Barred,” she analyzed a random sample of 1,004 NLRB union election campaigns, and conducted in-depth surveys with head union organizers in 562 of the campaigns.

Sixty-three percent of employers were reported to use mandatory one-on-one, anti-union meetings with employees. Further, 57 percent of employers threatened to close the workplace, 47 percent of employers issued threats to slash benefits and wages, and 34 percent of employers fired workers during union organizing drives.

"Both the intensity and changing character of employer behavior, as well as the fundamental flaws in the NLRB process,” Bronfenbrenner writes, “have left us with a system where workers who want to organize cannot exercise that right without fear, threats, harassment, and/or retribution."

Under the NLRB election process, 276,353 workers organized in 1970. By 1999, the year that Bronfenbrenner's latest study begins, 106,699 workers had won union representation through elections. In 2003, 71,427 workers organized. According to her findings, the decline is because of employer behavior such as threats, interrogation, promises, surveillance and retaliation for union activity. Bronfenbrenner confirmed every unfair labor practice mentioned by survey respondents through Freedom of Information Act requests to the NLRB.

She questions how much freedom American workers have regarding unionization.

"[E]mployers have control of the communication process. In today's organizing climate they take full advantage of that opportunity to communicate with their employees through a steady stream of letters, leaflets, e-mails, digital electronic media, individual one-on-one meetings with supervisors, and mandatory captive-audience meetings with top management during work time."

In her view, private employers try to neutralize union campaigns, emphasizing "interrogation and surveillance to identify supporters." If that fails, Bronfenbrenner says, "threats and harassment" follow "to try to dissuade workers from supporting the unions." She found that the union election win-rate for public-sector employees is nearly double that of private-sector workers.

Sacramento County's Keil said that if a majority (50 percent plus one vote) of nonunion managers vote for representation, the county executive’s office would begin to meet with the SCMA. One item for discussion would be job titles, or classes, under a collective bargaining agreement between the new union and the county, he said.

Seth Sandronsky lives and writes in Sacramento. Contact ssandronsky@yahoo.com