How One Journalist Learned About Modern Union-Busting the Hard Way

Sara Steffens, 37, is standing her ground. Once, she was a top reporter covering poverty and social services for the Contra Costa Times in Walnut Creek, California. Today, Steffens labors as a union organizer. But a lasting lesson about unions came as a journalist organizing her co-workers with the Bay Area News Group, a holding of MediaNews Group, Inc.  

The experience transformed Steffens, also a mother of two daughters, June, five months, and Rosie, three and a half years. "I was so surprised at what an organizing campaign actually looked like and how it worked," she said. "I hadn't come from a labor background. In my head it was going to be an intellectual debate between management and workers. I had this idea about what the best arguments would be for and against unions." 

In the months to come, her viewpoint would change along with her working conditions.

Company Resistance to the Union 

During the Guild's drive, MediaNews hired Cruz and Associates, Inc., based in Southern California, Steffens said. The firm's Web site touts its skill in "union avoidance [and] counter union communications strategy"; adding: "For the majority of our clients, the single largest operating expense is labor costs." 

Cruz and Associates declined to comment as to the scope of its work for MediaNews, whose general counsel is Marshall Anstandig. Asked what Cruz and Associates did during the union drive, Anstandig said that was "confidential." 

Less confidential is what happens when workers organize, and why employers resist the efforts with such zeal. Workers can bargain collectively with employers to improve pay, benefits and conditions. "Economic data have long demonstrated a substantial wage premium for unionized workers—on the order of 10 to 20 percent—relative to non-union workers with similar characteristics," according to John Schmitt, a senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. 

As a journalist, Steffens organized with the California Media Workers Guild, Local 39521, The Newspaper Guild-Communications Workers of America, AFL-CIO, CLC unit. Her version of that experience is noteworthy. 

"It's so difficult and scary to stand up in your workplace to choose a union when employers have constant access to you and control your livelihood," she said. A union has no such access to or control of employees at work. That power rests with employers.   

According to Steffens, "What the company actually did was to try and scare people in mandatory one-on-one meetings with their direct supervisors and management from voting for the union. Their message was that a pro-union vote might lead to layoffs and be a bad career move. 

"It's not really an open debate between the union and management. The way that our labor law system is set up now almost demands that management respond like that to organizing."   
 

A Necessity to Organize

According to Steffens, necessity drove her and her co-workers to launch the organizing campaign. "The company merged a bunch of newsrooms and quit recognizing an existing union," she said. "There was a group of us who saw organizing a new union as a way to keep alive the quality of our papers by exercising the strength of numbers." 

Do the math. The number of journalists in the combined newsrooms fell from 300 to 200 during the union drive. This trend reflects the industry's economic instability. It has dual causes. One is a sharp loss of ad revenue to the Internet. That shrinking revenue funds newspapers' operating expenses. The other is a brutal recession. Eight million jobs have been lost, doubling the ranks of the unemployed nationwide since Dec. 2007. These trends are shaking the foundations of mainstream print journalism and journalists.          

Steffens was an organizing co-chair with fellow reporters Karl Fischer, Carl Hall and Michael Manekin during a 6-month campaign leading up to a union vote. This is what workers must do to comply with the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. It calls for a secret-election ballot to (not) join a union. As the ballot date grew closer for Steffens and her workmates, they and management tracked the votes closely. Tensions rose. Livelihoods were at-risk. She and her co-workers won the National Labor Relations Board election of June 13, 2008 by a narrow margin. 

The bloom was quickly off that rose, though. A month after winning the vote to unionize, management dropped a figurative bomb in the form of layoffs for Steffens and 28 of her co-workers. "About two-thirds of those laid-off were union supporters," she said. "Conversely, none of the leaders of the in-house anti-union group were laid off." 

Anstandig, who also teaches labor law at Santa Clara University, said there was no "animus to the layoff decision" for Steffens and her co-workers. Rather, the company cutbacks were due to declines in revenue, circulation and "needing to make efforts to cut back on costs," he said.