L.A. Times Newsroom Workers Vote To Unionize

Back during my college years, I worked for the Los Angeles Times in Redondo Beach in their subscription sales department. During that time, the paper was run by the Chandler family. They took exceptional pride that they were not a union newspaper. This may sound odd, since the Times was a liberal newspaper, but that's the way it was. 

Since then, the Los Angeles Times was sold by the Chandlers and it has changed hands a few more times, mainly to incompetents. This has caused problems with the newspaper's staff. They saw regular cuts in benefits, raises and staff.

It appears they finally decided to fight back: They voted to unionize.

The Whittier Daily News reported:

LOS ANGELES — Newsroom employees at the Los Angeles Times voted overwhelmingly to unionize for the first time in the paper’s 136-year history, according to results tallied today. 

The results of the newsroom vote — tallied by the National Labor Relations Board — showed 248 employees voting in favor of unionizing, with 44 opposed. 

The L.A. Times Guild committee pushing for the union called the vote “a landslide victory, and a historic day for the Los Angeles Times newsroom.”

To me, this appears to be the beginning of the end of the Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles had another major daily newspaper (the one I actually preferred reading), the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner. That newspaper was a union newspaper owned by the Hearst Corp. Unfortunately, the union called a strike in 1967 and that strike was so severe and long-lasting that it virtually ruined the Herald-Examiner. It never fully recovered from the effects of the strike and the paper folded on November 2, 1989. I worked for the Herald-Examiner during the summer of 1977 as a photographer for their South Bay section.

I can easily see the Los Angeles Times falling the same way as the Herald-Examiner did. Only time will tell.

To read more, go here.