East Bay Express

Sticks & Stones notes Union Struggle

East Bay Express Columnist Paul Rauber, a cynical progressive columnist for this local alternative weekly, writes in his Sticks & Stones column on May 17, 1996:

Pay Your Pledge!

One might forgive KPFA staff for being a little less zealous than usual during the current pledge drive, given their current acrimonious relations with station management. In late March the staff union, U.E. Local 1412, informed management that it was exercising its right to call for a one-year extension of the current contract rather than enter into new negotiations. The union is aggrieved because, for the first time, KPFA management had hired a labor consultant to represent it.

As the union notes in an open letter, "Now KPFA employees were being asked to negotiate a new labor agreement with an antagonist paid with the very funds that KPFA staff themselves raise on the air in appeals promising listeners their donated funds will be used for programming that furthers KPFA's mission of peace and socialjustice."

Management is also seeking to exclude from union membership all supervisors, on-air personnel, producers,and volunteer workers, a move that would vastly cut the union's size and strength. "In the past," says the union's letter, "we have been able to work out differences with management and to adapt to new conditions without the intervention of outsiders or paid consultants.

During the past year we demonstrated our commitment to changing our radio station to better confront the future by working in close cooperation with management to plan and implement the most extensive programming format change in a quarter century." However, it continues, "management's secret mobilization for these contract talks, with all the appearances of anti-labor tactics employed by the most anti-union private corporations, constitutes a betrayal of that spirit of cooperation, and signals an alarming direction in which KPFA's treatment of its own employees may soon be at drastic odds with the progressive values it attempts to bring to the airwaves."

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Web page created August 13,1996

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