For more info, http://www.cwa-union.org
8,000 Bay Area workers at SBC start 4-day strike
Health-care costs a point of contention
Todd Wallack, SF Chronicle Staff Writer
Friday, May 21, 2004
Thousands of SBC Communications workers in 13 states, including California, walked off their jobs early this morning, marking the beginning of a four-day strike over health care and job security issues, after contract talks broke down between the telecommunications giant and its largest union.
SBC, California's largest phone company, has more than 17,000 employees in the Bay Area alone, making it one of the region's largest employers as well as the dominant local telephone provider in the area. The company operates more than 15 million residential and business phone lines in the state.
Though most phone calls should go through without a hitch because the phone network is largely automated, customers could be forced to wait longer on hold when calling operators or customer service. SBC could also take longer to repair downed phone lines or to install new ones, especially if a surprise storm, wildfire or other disaster takes out a large number of lines.
But SBC and some analysts predicted that only a fraction of customers would notice any glitches during such a short strike. SBC has recalled retirees, hired temporary contractors and trained managers to fill in for union workers during the walkout. The company has asked managers and other nonunion workers to postpone vacations and to be prepared to work 12-hour days, without any days off, during the strike.
"I don't think there will be any impact in a short strike,'' said Jeff Kagan, an independent telecommunications analyst based in Marietta, Ga., "unless there is an avalanche of problems," meaning an unusual flood of calls or outages.
Both sides said the national negotiations had broken off earlier this week, with no indication when they would resume.
In Meriden, Conn., nearly 200 striking workers gathered at SBC's technical center early today. They cheered as co-workers walked out of the center after their shift, then formed a line across the road in front of the plant.
Employee Robert Brown said he believes the company is obligated to provide its workers with adequate benefits. "I have two children, so benefits are everything," Brown, 44, of Middletown, Conn., told the Associated Press.
Similar protests were planned at SBC offices across the Golden State today. On Thursday, workers made signs and met at union halls in San Francisco, Oakland and elsewhere to gear up for the strike.
The Communications Workers of America -- which represents 100,000 SBC employees, including 8,000 in the Bay Area alone -- announced plans earlier this week to stage a four-day strike, picket company offices and take other steps to pressure the company to improve its contract proposal. The strike, which began just after midnight in each time zone, is slated to last until 12: 01 Tuesday morning.
"SBC needs a wake-up call that our members are serious about keeping hometown jobs and quality health care," CWA President Morton Bahr told workers.
The company's CEO, Edward Whitacre, however, said this week that the company had already made the union a "very strong" offer and could not afford to give in to union demands to sweeten the deal. On Thursday, Whitacre said SBC would take back the offer if the union did not accept it by Monday night.
So far, the main sticking points in the negotiations have been health care and job security.
Citing double-digit increases in health care costs, SBC wants workers to pay higher co-payments, which will work out to an extra $35 per month for the average worker, when they see a doctor or order prescription drugs.
SBC says that workers won't have to pay a monthly premium and that the co- payments would cover about 10 percent of workers' health care costs, up from 4 to 7 percent under the old labor contracts. By comparison, SBC says workers at other U.S. companies pay more than one-third of the health care costs.
But the CWA, which also represents many journalists at The Chronicle, said the increases would effectively double workers' health care costs immediately and nearly triple them by the end of the proposed five year- contract.
Moreover, the union contends that the company is proposing only modest wage increases, and, therefore, should be able to use the savings to keep workers' health care costs down.
Specifically, SBC offered workers a 4 percent one-time bonus for the first year of the agreement, 2.5 percent raises over the next two years and raises of 2.25 percent plus cost-of-living increases over the last two years of the contract. The CWA says the company would save $1 billion in the first year alone by offering a one-time payment, rather than a traditional wage increase.
Though the economy has been picking up, many companies have been trying to keep a lid on wage increases for the past few years. Overall, hourly wages for rank-and-file workers increased about 2 to 3 percent over the past year in the utilities and information sector, which includes telecommunications, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But pay has increased at a faster rate overall at traditional telephone providers, the category that includes SBC. Including stock options and bonuses, wages rose more than 6 percent for all workers in the sector from the fall of 2002 to 2003, the government said.
Moreover, CWA officials angrily point to increases in executive pay and benefits at SBC to argue the company can afford to pay union workers more. Last year, SBC gave raises to its top managers in California averaging 19 percent. It has promised health care benefits for life to Whitacre, who earned $19.5 million in compensation last year, not including stock options, as well as office space, support staff and use of a car and jet.
SBC, however, argues its pay is in line with other major companies and often swings up and down from one year to the next, because so much of executive compensation is tied to bonuses.
On Wednesday, SBC said technicians earned more than $65,000 per year, including overtime, but it conceded Thursday that average union workers might earn less than that.
SBC indicated operators typically earned about $39,525 per year, service representatives $46,500 and technicians about $56,000, though veteran employees can make much more with overtime.
Both sides disagree whether the company can afford to pay more. Union officials point out that SBC's profit soared 49 percent to $8.5 billion last year. But SBC counters that the profit gains were related to one-time accounting changes (without the accounting changes, profits would have fallen 25 percent to $6 billion) and that revenue has steadily dropped.
In any case, a short strike most likely won't nick the company's profits. SBC shares dropped just 10 cents Thursday to $24.31. And Whitacre said SBC would actually save money during the strike, despite spending money training managers and hiring temporary help.
"When you don't have a workforce, your expenses go down pretty quickly," Whitacre told financial analysts in April.
Bay Area newspapers nowhere near as diverse as the population
By Michael Stoll, http://www.gradethenews.org
May 17, 2004
No newspaper staff in the Bay Area comes close to matching the ethnic diversity of the regions they cover, a national study of hiring practices shows.
While minority staffing at newspapers across the country inched upward slightly this year, locally the results were mixed. Some papers have made significant strides, and others stagnated.
Diversity has become an important measure of a newsroom's ability to understand, win trust, and ultimately report insightfully on the varied communities it serves. In the nine-county Bay Area, racial and ethnic minorities comprise 50% of the population, according to 2002 estimates prepared by the Association of Bay Area Governments.
The San Jose Mercury News leads the Bay Area on the diversity measure developed by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, with 32% non-white staff in its newsroom. That's nearly twice the number of minority journalists the paper had 10 years ago. But diversity is a moving target -- the paper's employees still do not come close to reflecting the rapidly changing demographics of the South Bay.
The Mercury News would need to increase its minority reporters, editors, photographers and designers by two-thirds to match the South Bay's population.
Another Knight Ridder-owned paper, the Contra Costa Times, has steadily increased its non-white newsroom staffing to 19% by ensuring that every pool of qualified applicants includes ethnic minorities and women, said the paper's managing editor, Chris Lopez. But it would have to double its complement of minority journalists to match Contra Costa County.
The biggest disappointment was the San Francisco Chronicle, whose staff diversity has slumped in recent years, to less than 15% -- in a circulation area whose minority population is nearly the majority. Five years ago, before merging with the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, the paper's had more than 18% minority staff. The Chronicle's managing editor, Robert Rosenthal, said the paper recognizes its shortcomings and is working on a vigorous plan to diversify.
Newspaper staff diversity chart (see http://www.gradethenews.org)
Few American newspapers meet diversity targets
If Bay Area newspapers look whiter than their communities, they are hardly alone. The study found that only 13% of newspapers nationwide had reached parity -- a staffing level at which the percentage of minorities on the staff met or exceeded that of its readership. Overall, minority journalists represented 12.95% of all newsroom employees in the survey. The survey was conducted by ASNE; the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation funded further analysis of the data. The Knight Foundation, which is a sponsor of Grade the News, is independent of Knight Ridder.
For some prominent local media reformers, diversity isn't just a politically correct catchphrase. A consensus has been forming that it's crucial to doing good journalism.
"If you don't have diversity you have blind spots, things that you'd ordinarily miss," said Dori Maynard, president of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, based in Oakland. Robert Maynard, her late husband, was responsible for getting ASNE to pledge in 1978 to get the entire newspaper industry to parity by the year 2000 -- a goal that fell far short of the mark.
Minorities declining among broadcast journalists
Television news has encountered similar problems. According to a study by the Radio-Television News Directors Association and Ball State University, minorities made up 18% of newsroom employees last year. That was down from 21% the year before. The trend toward a lower percentage of minority journalists in radio is even more pronounced. In 1994, minority journalists comprised 15% of the radio workforce. In 2003, it was under 7%. These surveys include Spanish-language stations. The surveys did not break out Bay Area stations.
Erna Smith, a professor of journalism at San Francisco State University, said Knight Ridder in particular has been in the forefront of newsroom diversity efforts.
"Your editorial staff is a brain trust, and if everyone in the room knows the same thing, there are things that when you see them, you really don't know how to evaluate them," Prof. Smith said. "Diversity is usually presented as castor oil: 'Do it because it's good for you.' At the Mercury News that seemed to be the other way around."
The Mercury News has integrated the discussion of diversity into its coverage, challenging reporters to produce stories on neglected populations. Non-whites make up 53% of the population in the paper's core circulation area, ASNE calculates.
Last year the Mercury News offered every reporter on every beat a week in
which they would be freed from deadlines to explore stories and meet
sources who added to diverse coverage, said Executive Editor Susan Goldberg. "We know that if we're not talking to Indian engineers, Vietnamese bankers
or Latino artists, then we're really not representing the fullness of our
community."
The Mercury News also considers coverage of women to be a diversity issue,
Ms. Goldberg added. She said the paper is trying to get reporters to add
more women to their lists of expert and authority sources, so that women
are not quoted only in the "person on the street" context. In the last year
and a half, the paper has added new Style and Family sections to attract
more women readers.
The Contra Costa Times also has been keen on diversity since Knight Ridder purchased it in 1995. Since then, minorities as a percentage of the staff have tripled.
Mr. Lopez said that if the applicants for a job are not diverse, the paper goes out of its way to recruit more who are, before making a selection. "If the diversity is built into the pool of applicants, you have a greater chance to have the workforce representative."
'Our numbers are very bad'
The Chronicle's diversity efforts are complicated by promise the Hearst Corp. made not to lay off journalists in the merger of the Chronicle and Examiner staffs in 2000. That has slowed new hiring.
"Our numbers are very bad, and we're not proud of them, and we plan on changing that," Managing Editor Rosenthal said.
In addition to a renewed focus on diverse hiring, the Chronicle is trying to spark some creative thinking about covering diverse communities. The paper has assembled a race-and-demographics team of four or five reporters who look for stories in communities that the paper has historically ignored.
"We're trying to change the culture here," Mr. Rosenthal said. "All those things we're doing. Our commitment will not be seen in one year, but when you come back to it in three or four years it will be a very different story."
Tribune and ANG papers trail
The staff of the Oakland Tribune last year was just 18% minority, in a circulation area that is 67% minority.
"If we had more minorities I think it would be easier to get at the heart of issues," said Mario Dianda, the paper's editor. One problem the paper is facing now: It has a few Spanish-speaking reporters, but not enough. "The illegal drivers issue doesn't get much play in our paper, but I know it's big in the community because I watch Telemundo at night."
The Tribune does groom six or seven young minority journalists every year through internships partially sponsored by the Freedom Forum, a journalism organization based in Arlington, Va. Other South Bay Alameda Newspaper Group papers also lagged. The Tri-Valley Herald, San Mateo Times, and Hayward Daily Review reached less than 15% of parity. The Freemont Argus rated at 21% of parity.
Bob Swofford, the managing editor of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, said his paper has the same policy as the Contra Costa Times: get qualified minorities in every applicant pool. His paper has reached 50% of parity.
One problem at medium-sized and smaller papers is retaining journalists. The Press-Democrat is losing one of its best minority reporters to the Chronicle, Mr. Swofford said.
Riots sparked newsroom diversity
The push for newsroom diversity started during the race riots of the 1960s, when white reporters were chased out of black neighborhoods. The 1968 Kerner Commission report further advanced the cause of newsroom diversity when it documented the lack of understanding that many white reporters brought to covering issues in black communities. That led to a wave of foundation research into increasing the multicultural resources of the press and educating and encouraging young minority journalists. The Maynard Institute was one group that emerged from that effort.
The ASNE diversity study started in 1978 as a project of Jay Harris, then a journalism professor at Northwestern University, later publisher of the Mercury News and now Director of the Center for the Study of Journalism and Democracy at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.
NEWSROOM DIVERSITY AT OTHER LARGE CALIFORNIA PAPERS
(for Chart see http://www.gradethenews.org )
By Bob Wing
War Times newspaper, http://www.war-times.org
A friend of mine was discussing Abu Ghraib with his Egyptian father, who had originally supported the war. Referring to the photo of the female U.S. soldier with a leash around a prostrate Iraqi, he asked his Dad, "What is the message of that photo? It's that the Iraqi is a dog."
His father replied, "No. The message is that he's MY dog."
The tortures at Abu Ghraib have exposed to the world the utter moral bankruptcy of Bush's war. Far from being fought on behalf of Iraqi democracy, it is a war for U.S. supremacy in which racist dehumanization and brutalization of Arabs and
Muslims play an absolutely central role.
Since September 11 the White House has framed its "war on terrorism" in thinly veiled racial and religious terms: as a crusade of the "civilized" against the "uncivilized." This unsavory propaganda campaign has built upon a more than decade-long effort by the government and the media to demonize Arabs and Muslims as "bloodthirsty terrorists."
This depiction harkens back to the portrayal of Native Americans as savages out to scalp the good white settlers who only wanted to bring light to their dark existence--and, incidentally, to destroy their way of life and occupy their land. The sexual humiliation of Iraqis recalls the daily rape of black slaves. And the smiling faces of the Abu Ghraib perpetrators and the trophy photos they took remind us of the images of white people who gathered to enjoy the lynching of black people in the South.
To justify its war of choice, the White House added to this racist imagery the myth that the chief Arab terrorist was Saddam Hussein and that he was bent on attacking us with Weapons of Mass Destruction. To this day the racial ignorance so common in our country has enabled many Americans to hang on to the Bush fable that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks. The twisted logic is that an Arab is a Palestinian is a Muslim is a Terrorist is an Iraqi. What's the difference? They all must be destroyed before they destroy us first!
SANITIZING WAR
At the same time Washington made extraordinary efforts to conceal the horrors of war. Fearing that its racialized propaganda might not be enough to convince the gentle public to send its sons and daughters off to kill or be killed for the
greater glory of the military and Big Oil, it sought to conceal all deaths and present the Iraq war as a sort of Boy Scout outing for the good of civilization.
The "war on terrorism" in Iraq became the 21st century version of the White Man's Burden.
Washington bought up all rights to satellite photographs and otherwise ensured
that no horrific battlefield scenes would ever disturb the public's less than watchful eyes. Similarly it ended the practice of counting the dead. Instead,
the president continually assured us that his "high tech weaponry" only struck "the really bad guys."
The White House campaign to sanitize the war was so successful that the fact that more than 10,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed in this "noble mission" is virtually a state secret. It even banned the photographing of the caskets of dead U.S. soldiers. The president has avoided attending their funerals lest the public be reminded that war actually involves the horrible death of human beings.
However, it is not enough to lay responsibility for the tortures at Abu Ghraib
and the murderous Iraq war at the doorstep of the White House, its rightwing
ideologues or its corporate cronies. We must also address the self-interested
racist gullibility that makes the U.S. public susceptible to war mongering. Much
of that public has shown that it will let its attachment to an SUV lifestyle and
false patriotism lead it to support leaders who destroy the lives and steal the
resources of people who can be dismissed as racial inferiors--at home as well as
abroad.
MORAL AWAKENING NEEDED
Indeed, the random jailing of more than 15,000 Iraqis reminds us that more black men in the U.S. are incarcerated than have graduated from college. Torture was practiced in U.S. prisons long before Abu Ghraib.
The mass round up of Arabs and Muslims in the U.S. since September 11 resurrects the internment of Japanese Americans as "enemy aliens" during WWII. And the self-serving U.S. denunciation of "foreign terrorists" in Iraq mirrors the arrogance of Anglos calling for "English Only" and a crackdown on "illegal immigrants" while occupying land stolen from Mexico in an earlier U.S. "war of liberation.
Abu Ghraib has exploded the myth that Bush's war was a moral, high tech war in
which only terrorists suffered. It has finally brought the brutal treatment of Arabs and Muslims out into such harsh light that even the sleepy U.S. public snapped to attention.
But condemnation of Abu Ghraib cannot be the end. It must instead be the
beginning of a profound moral awakening in this land that will lead us not only
to end this war, but to open our minds and hearts to correct the manifold racist
lies and injustices that continue to deform the daily fabric of U.S. life--from
its foreign policy to its elections to its classrooms to its prison cells.
As the great African American poet Langston Hughes once declared, "America
never was America to me. But it must be!"
_______________________
*Bob Wing is managing editor of War Times/Tiempo de Guerras and a co-chair of
United for Peace and Justice (http://www.unitedforpeace.org), a national antiwar coalition of more than 800 organizations. A special issue of War Times will further
discuss the race and gender issues embedded in the Iraq war.
War Times/Tiempo de Guerras needs your support. Visit us at http://www.war-times.org today to make a donation.
War Times/Tiempo de Guerras, c/o EB, 1230 Market St., PMB 409, San Francisco, CA 94102
July 9th-10th at The Oakland Asian Cultural Center
By NorCal Society of Professional Journalists
NEW APPLICATION DEADLINE: May 31, 2004
Be a part of the Multicultural Writer-Editor Match!
Forge new relationships with assigning editors from a variety of top-flight national magazines such Wired, AARP: The Magazine, Sierra, Mother Jones, and National Geographic.
If you are an experienced professional writer with skills in multicultural reporting, you may qualify for a *match*. You will be set up with several editors for one-on-one sessions throughout the day. All writers at all levels are invited to participate in a day-long series of workshops on topics to help you get ahead in the freelance world, including: how to negotiate a great contract, how to write a winning query, how to turn a great story into a book proposal, and how to support your work with grants and fellowships.
Matches include:
* A 20-minute interview with each editor to pitch ideas, discuss magazine needs, and get immediate feedback
* A 20-minute coaching session
* A 3-hour workshop on pitching and follow-up on July 9
The fee for a full day of workshops is only $65; for the matching sessions, a total of $150, far less than you will make on your very first assignment!
SPJ member discounted rate for matching sessions: $130
Apply now for a match - Space is limited.
Go to http://www.spj.org/norcal/ for an application,
Or, if you just want to attend the workshop, reserve a space by emailing your name, address and email to "spjworkshop@bestwrit.com"
By John McManus, http://www.gradethenews.org
May 11, 2004
In the daily "chess match" between the press and political candidates' spin masters, the journalists are getting outwitted and the public checkmated.
That's how Shanto Iyengar, an expert in political communication at Stanford University, describes the struggle to control news in current and recent campaigns.
He likened it to a "tragedy of the commons" in which every one acts in their self-interest, but destroys the common good. Politicians' "handlers" are able to manage coverage to benefit their candidates. News media earn revenues by avoiding "boring" political policy stories. But "the net loser in this scenario is the consumer, the voter," Prof. Iyengar charged during a panel discussion Tuesday at Stanford University's Green Library.
Defending mainstream news media, James Bettinger, director of the John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists at Stanford, argued that reporters do cover policy issues that voters can use to choose among candidates. But he acknowledged that journalists are under siege from increasingly aggressive and sophisticated political advisors who take advantage of reporting conventions.
Jon Krosnick, a professor of psychology and political science at Ohio State University currently teaching at Stanford, said the press has failed to illuminate key campaign issues with the frequency distracted citizens need to make informed choices.
Political news more important than ever - James Bettinger
All three speakers emphasized the importance of news to democracy. In fact, Prof. Bettinger said, the "press has assumed a greater role in the selection of candidates" as political parties' influence has waned over the 20th century.
Before a single primary vote is cast, Mr. Bettinger explained, political reporters vet candidates in terms of the amount of money they've raised, the quality of their political organizations, how they rank in early polls and who has endorsed them. At the beginning of the Democratic presidential primary campaign Dennis Kucinich was framed as a non-contender before the public ever got to know him, he said. "Once this frame gets set, it's very hard to break."
Those criteria, the former San Jose Mercury News city editor noted, differ from assessing what a candidate might do in office.
Despite this power to define who is and who isn't a worthy candidate, the press claims the role of simple observer, Mr. Bettinger said. It's something, he added, journalists haven't thought through.
Political scientists have. "The press is defining the news," said Mr. Iyengar, "and not merely describing events."
Political reporting, he continued, is "a struggle for control" between the press and candidates' advisors. "Invariably it is the professional handlers who end up winning this struggle."
Shrinking sound bites - Shanto Iyengar
Mr. Iyengar, who chairs the Communication Department, cited research showing the average amount of time a candidate is permitted to speak without interruption on television newscasts has fallen from 90 seconds in the 1960s to six seconds today.
"Journalists are no longer willing to entrust the air waves to the candidates," he complained. News media have interjected pundits to explain the candidates, rather than letting the candidates speak for themselves. Those pundits, he said, usually present candidates as cynical opportunists who "will say anything to get elected." The result? The public tunes politics out and may skip voting.
Mr. Iyengar said the press exhibits a "pathological" fascination with "horse race" reporting about candidates' strategies and popularity polls. Coverage ought to center on each candidate's core policy positions, "platform versus platform."
Avoiding skeptical reporters
For their part, political advisors manipulate the press, Mr. Iyengar said. The president was on a bus tour of the Midwest avoiding the heat in Washington developing over torture and humiliation of Iraqi detainees by U.S. forces, he said. Avoiding the more informed Washington press corps for small town journalists is "a very simple kind of gimmick." Calling infrequent press conferences, he said, is another tactic.
Political advertising, Mr. Iyengar added, is often aimed at the press, designed to set the media's agenda with the hope that in covering the controversy, negative claims in the ads may gain additional repetition. As a result, "the press does the bidding of the handlers."
Jon Krosnick
Prof. Krosnick also called the press on its attention to the drama of the race among candidates rather than issues they stand for. Strategies and polls change daily, but policies become old news the day after they've been reported, even if many readers or viewers weren't paying attention that day, Mr. Krosnick said.
What do do?
In interviews after the panel discussion, Mr. Iyengar called for frequent front page coverage of issues, emphasizing how each candidate's policies would affect local communities. Mr. Krosnick suggested the press set the news agenda, taking key issues such as the environment, economy, abortion and contrasting the candidates' position at the top of the news each day.
"One easy step for newspapers to take, Mr. Bettinger noted, "would be to publish more stories analyzing candidates' records and proposals in other than strictly political terms. That is, to examine them in detail on their intrinsic merits, rather than in terms of their political effectiveness and ramifications." Past coverage could remain on the paper's Web site and newer articles could reference it, he added.