McClatchy, the corporate owners of The Bellingham Herald who were taken over by a hedge fund after bankruptcy, appears willing to accept the inevitable. News employees at the chain’s four Washington newspapers are all but certain to unionize, to protect their own interests along with the integrity of professional journalism in their communities.
But McClatchy has raised a major objection to the new bargaining unit, called the Washington State NewsGuild. According to a petition McClatchy filed Dec. 31 with the National Labor Relations Board, the newspaper chain wants the proposed union divided into four—one for each newspaper.
The NewsGuild will fight McClatchy’s move when both sides state their cases before the NLRB at a remote hearing, 9 a.m. Tuesday, Jan. 12.
“McClatchy’s attempts to make our union smaller, with newsrooms that only have a handful of workers, is something we consider to be a blatant attempt to undercut our power,” said Chase Hutchinson, a reporter for The Peninsula Gateway and The News Tribune of Tacoma.
McClatchy is also asking that Dave Rasbach, onetime sports editor at The Bellingham Herald and current breaking-news reporter, be excluded from the union. The Bellingham Herald’s website lists Rasbach as a reporter, but a document submitted to the NLRB appears to say his job title is “senior editor/sports and feature (sic); breaking-news reporter.” Rasbach occasionally serves as backup editor, supporting Executive Editor and General Manager Julie Shirley.
All told, McClatchy seeks to exclude one person from each paper. And overall, McClatchy appears willing to recognize 35 employees as union members at the four papers—20 at The News Tribune, and five each at The Bellingham Herald, The Olympian, and the Tri-City Herald.
McClatchy just doesn’t want them all under the same union banner.
McClatchy’s argument, detailed here, says the newspapers are hundreds of miles apart, and the four newsrooms are on four separate missions to report their various communities’ news. “At bottom, the four newspapers are disparate and independent in myriad ways, including geographic location, localized autonomy and control, and terms and conditions of employment. Accordingly, each paper requires its own bargaining unit,” McClatchy’s argument concludes.
For its part, the NewsGuild will bring its own ream of past case law to argue that a “multifacility unit” is appropriate in this case.
Denver Pratt, crime and justice reporter for The Bellingham Herald, said McClatchy has been treating the four Washington papers as a single team.
“We collaborate intensively,” Pratt said. “There’s so much talk among our editors, and we have the same state regional editor.” Reporters at the four papers sometimes write into a single story, providing their local angles on the issue being covered, she said.
“Everything up to this point from McClatchy has been telling us, over and over again, that we are a collective whole, that we are covering the state and working together,” she said. “If you’re going to treat us as a collective whole, then treat us as a collective whole.”
Pratt said McClatchy had signalled late last week that it would be willing to recognize a single bargaining unit representing the Tacoma and Olympia papers, but Bellingham and the Tri-Cities should remain separate.
“If two of our papers can be together, then why can’t all four?” she said.
The petition filed on behalf of The Bellingham Herald indicates that Executive Editor Shirley is opposing the formation of a single union among the four papers in the state. However, the form was filled out and signed by a lawyer. Shirley’s role in this case may be in name only. She did not return a request for comment.
“Our unionization efforts are not a referendum on any of our local leadership, and that includes Julie,” Pratt said. The union’s goals, she said, are about a living wage for reporters and photographers, sure—but they’re also about diversity and stability.
“This is about making sure … that the newsrooms reflect the communities we cover, and that there will be strong journalism in these communities for decades to come,” she said.
“McClatchy could still do the right thing. They could still voluntarily recognize our union,” Pratt added.
After the NLRB hears the two sides Tuesday morning, the board will deliberate and issue its decision at a later date. If McClatchy loses, it could appeal. If the NewsGuild loses, one option would be to ask McClatchy if the four units could collaborate during contract negotiations. And if McClatchy doesn’t voluntarily recognize the union, in whatever form, workers would vote to unionize. The guild is confident that vote would succeed.
The past 12 months have been rough for Bellingham Herald staff. In February 2020, McClatchy declared bankruptcy, following a long period when it dragged itself deeper into debt after the ill-advised purchase of the Knight Ridder newspaper chain in 2006. Then the COVID-19 pandemic forced business lockdowns, and reporters were largely isolated from each other, working from home. Then, in late summer, a deal enabling McClatchy to emerge from bankruptcy was finalized. The chain would be sold to its largest creditor, the hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. Herald workers knew Chatham had already decimated Canada’s largest newspaper chain.
The move to form a union, which began shortly after the Chatham deal was done, has galvanized Pratt’s morale, she said.
“I think it’s made me more invested in my workplace,” she said. “My hope is the community sees we’re not just doing this for ourselves but that we’re doing this for them, and that we really care.”
“I have loved working at the Herald, and I still love it.”
Comments by Readers
Bernie Housen
Jan 11, 2021Well, if faculty at WWU, CWU, EWU, and Evergreen State can be in the same union, it seems doable for these newspapers.
Elizabeth Kilanowski
Jan 11, 2021I belonged to the UAW, the IAM, and the United Steelworkers at different points in my life. The places unionized by all of them were widely dispersed and represented, in the case of the UAW, not only auto workers but graduate students at various universities.
Dianne Foster
Jan 11, 2021Ralph,
I never understood why you left the Herald. You were the best-ever writer. I loved the series on local political groups, and you interviewed myself and several other of us old women in Occupy Bellingham. I’m distraught that local newspapers are struggling now, and have been for years. I donated to the Herald and Cascadia Weekly. I was grateful that the Herald let me (along with Community to Community, the WTA union leadership, and others) publish op-eds twice opposing the neoliberal TPP, and thank Julie Shirley for the time she spent helping with it.
Ultimately, I have to blame the readers for not subscribing. I have about 20 subscriptions, because good journalism is so important. That includes the Herald in print, Seattle Times, NY Times, LA Times, Truthout, Common Dreams, Real News Network, Consortium News, etc. Hedge funds are predatory, living off the labor of others. Workers need to unite! Blessings to you.
Oh, and interestingly, as an ARNP many years ago in Bremerton, I was a member of the engineers union… maybe they think a nurse-practitioner adjusts nuts and bolts on humans….
Christopher S Hudson
Jan 13, 2021Dianne,
It’s good you support your journalistic sources, but don’t blame readers for not supporting The Herald. Unions are great for organizing workers to improve conditions, pay and benefits, but the financial model used by The Bellingham Herald, once functional as an information source and representative of the community of Bellingham, is a shadow of its former self. It is barely functional as a source of information.
Check out some editions of the paper from the the decades prior to and after WW2…. wow you could actually find out what was going on around town, regionally and nationally. Lots of columns, writers, details…
Newspapers are a broke model until they try a totally new approach and I don’t know what it is… when I was a student half a century ago working in the periodicals section of the college library (the graveyard shift) I read the NY Times, The Chicago Tribune, The London Times, so many newspapers and periodicals… as an information junkie I learned rapidly that most writing had an ideological bias disguised as “who-what-when-where” reporting but it was necessary to get several detailed reports from several angles. That requires well paid, well educated, hard working reporting… but what we see locally, regionally and nationally these days is usually a type of stenography. It’s a problem rooted in a broken economic model. Unionization won’t fix it.
Dianne Foster
Jan 13, 2021Oh, absolutely. I’ve been a Herald subscriber since ‘92, and have watched all newspapers around the country be swallowed up by hedge funds and obliterated. I loved the old Newstand downtown, and could stand there all day reading everything from the Guardian to the NY Times. Now the Herald is about 10 pages long, including classifieds. Seattle Times writer Jon Talton and I have been chatting about this for a while. And most of what they do is download articles from the AP or others. The Herald always had a policy of not covering local protests, so after about 1000 people gathered for the first climate march in downtown, the headline next day was about kittens at the Humane Society. Nonpolitical friends who attended the rally were shocked - not me, what I expected.
Probably the biggest factor is advertisers abandoning print for online forums. I frankly don’t know what to do about restoring good journalists and journalism- who would want to major in it now, knowing they couldn’t find work? The first big lay-offs I remember were in the mid-90’s, when the L.A. Times decided that gossip columns were more important than real news. So I pay to subscribe to as many as possible to try and halt the slide…..